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Toolkits for a Distributed, Agent-Based Web Commerce System - Summary

by Guanghao Yan, Wee-Keong Ng and Ee-Peng Lim

December 6, 1998

This article is divided into 8 parts:

Introduction
Agent-Based Web Commerce System
Seller Software Toolkit
Buyer Software Toolkit
Directory Agent
Agent Interactions
Related Work
Summary & References

In order to promote the widespread use and deployment of software agents on the Web for electronic commerce, we propose the construction of buyer and seller toolkits which individuals and organizations use to create and customize agents. For a seller, the toolkit provides web site authoring and maintenance with a database system, and software agents representing the seller. For a buyer, the toolkit creates agents for goods and service acquisition. To provide linkage between buyer and seller agents, we have directory agents that store information about agents. This paper describes our preliminary work in the design and implementation of such an agent-based web commerce system. Due to limitations in the length of paper, we shall report other aspects of our work in future papers.



References

(1) S. Hamilton. e-commerce for the 21st Century. COMPUTER, Vol. 30, No. 5, pp. 44--47, May 1997.

(2) P. Maes. Agents that Reduce Work and Information Overload. Communications of the ACM, Vol. 37, No. 7, pp. 31--40, 146, ACM Press, July 1994.

(3) O. Etzioni and D. S. Weld. Intelligent Agents on the Internet: Fact, Fiction, and Forecast. IEEE Expert, Vol. 10, No. 4, August 1995.

(4) M. Tsvetovatyy, M. Gini, B. Mobasher, and Z. Wieckowski. MAGMA: An Agent-Based Virtual Market for Electronic Commerce. Journal of Applied Artificial Intelligence, September 1997.

(5) A. Chavez and P. Maes. Kasbah: An Agent Marketplace for Buying and Selling Goods. In Proceedings of the First International Conference on the Practical Application of Intelligent Agents and Multi-Agent Technology, London, UK, April 1996.

(6) R. B. Doorenbos, O. Etzioni, and D. S. Weld. A Scalable Comparison-Shopping Agent for the World-Wide-Web. In Proceedings of the First International Conference on Autonomous Agents, Marina Del Ray, CA, February 1997.

(7) L. Yannis and T. Finin. A Semantics Approach for KQML --- A General Purpose Communication Language for Software Agents. In Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management(CIKM'94), ACM Press, November 1994.

(8) T. Finin, R. F. D. McKay and R. McEntire. KQML as an Agent Communication Language. In Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM'94), ACM Press, November 1994.

This article is divided into 8 parts:

Introduction
Agent-Based Web Commerce System
Seller Software Toolkit
Buyer Software Toolkit
Directory Agent
Agent Interactions
Related Work
Summary & References

This article is reprinted with kind permission from the book:

Electronic Commerce
ISBN 3-932588-24-X
Published by:
dpunkt

The book is reviewed here in the WDJ.

Nanyang Technological University Center for Advanced Information Systems
School of Applied Science
Singapore 639798
Singapore

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