Intelligent pages collecting shop and service information with software agents

This article introduces an information collecting method for shop and service information from the Internet. Because the shop information is heterogeneous and distributed, it is difficult for users to gather and handle it. Although it is heterogeneous, it can be semistructured insofar as it usually has a name, address, etc. We introduce the telephone directory information as an ontology server that defines relationships between the user's abstract expression of shops and the concrete expression, such as shop names. We designed a software agent architecture. Agents work together to support creating queries for users, to search and locate the information providers, and to organize the search results on behalf of the user. We applied this architecture to the Intelligent Pages and developed it on portable computers, a UNIX workstation, and Internet servers, including the telephone directory server we also developed. Intelligent Pages lists shops from the Yellow Pages with additional information from other sou...