WEB-BASED INTELLIGENT SYSTEMS

13.2 WEB-BASED INTELLIGENT SYSTEMS

The Opening Vignette illustrates an application of autonomous computer systems, also often called intelligent agents. These programs can perform certain tasks automatically according to the rules and inference mechanisms given by the designer. Since the intro- duction of the Internet and the World Wide Web (WWW), these systems have been armed with a Web-based architecture and friendly user interface. Given the explosion

Source: Abridged from Maher, K., "Web-based Tools Help Find The Right Persons for the Job," Wall Street

C H A P T E R 13 INTELLIGENT SYSTEMS OVER THE INTERNET

of information on the Web, autonomous agents will become very popular. In fact, many Internet services are already using them to provide better service. For example, a retailing store may use an agent to automatically answer frequently asked questions or to reply to e-mails. An auction Web site may use software agents to monitor the auc-

tioning process.

A major feature of Web-based intelligent systems is that they use the Web as a platform to deliver services. Their user interfaces are Web-enabled. Moreover, they are able to communicate with each other through a Web-based protocol. For example, when a Web-based system has to reply to a client's e-mail, it must be able to retrieve key words from the e-mail, determine the theme of the message, and choose a proper answer from its knowledge base. Figure 13.1 shows an example of how a Web-based system works over the Internet. The user enters the request in the box and clicks the "find it" button. The system interprets the query and converts it into a set of machine- understandable codes for execution. The system then outputs the findings at the bot- tom. The Web-based user interface is a friendly channel through which the user inter- acts with the system. The kernel of the system (including the knowledge base and the interpreting and reasoning mechanisms) is hidden behind the Web. Most users will not

be aware of their existence.

Web-based intelligent systems can be used for many purposes and can have differ- ent forms. There are small systems, often called agents, that perform very specific tasks.

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P A R T I V INTELLIGENT DECISION SUPPORT SYSTEMS

There may also be complicated systems that contain sophisticated knowledge in their knowledge base (e.g., a system that analyzes customer profiles) or are composed of many separate agents.

The example shown in Figure 13.1 is a very simple search agent for finding infor- mation. In real-world applications, systems can be much more complicated and may have many different categories. For example, a Web-based intelligent system for travel planning may include both information and monitoring agents (Knoblock, 2002). Information agents take a particular information request and navigate to the appropri- ate page on a Web site, locate the required information, and return it as an XML docu- ment for processing by another agent.

Monitoring agents are built on top of the information agent to keep track of previ- ously returned results, such as price or schedule changes in travel planning. They need to know the current state before performing the job. To track price changes, for exam- ple, the agent must know about previous prices.

A special type of information agent is called a recommender or recommendation

agent. These are gaining attention because customized and personalized services are critical to maintaining good customer relationships. On-line bookstores, such as Amazon.com and bn.com, use them to recommend books to clients, and online video

rentals use them to recommend new videos to clients. The recommender system opens

a whole new arena for the application of Web-based intelligent systems (Montaner et al., 2003). Developing good Web-based intelligent applications needs to incorporate more semantic information. The Web protocol that allows semantic information to be included and represented is called the semantic Web. In later sections of the chapter,

concepts and applications of intelligent agents, the semantic Web, and the recommen- dation system will be introduced.