New intelligent agents to facilitate electronic brokerage
The GAIA reference model is a generic framework for information brokerage. It discovers information, goods and services for the customer, locates suppliers, negotiates on issues regarding quality, delivery and price, delivers in the digital domain and manages payment. The new intelligent agents will act in collaboration with each one of these phases. Three types of software were investigated: An Interaction Agent to help the user interact with the brokerage system; a Metadata Collector Agent to collect information about metadata in the domain of technical data from suppliers' Web sites and mailing lists; and an Alerting Agent to identify information items that are of interest to users and notify them according to their preferences. The University of the Aegean was involved in the development of the Interaction and Alerting Agents. Both systems have been tested successfully and are now available for demonstration.
