Intelligent Information Agents

Abstract

With the unprecedented abundance of digital information available on the Web and the Internet, there is an increasing need for intelligent software assistants to effectively manage such information and transform them into useful knowledge in the right form for the right person at the right time and situation. Indeed, intelligent information agents find application in almost every facet of life including business, education, commerce, industry, and entertainment. Developing such software is non-trivial and spans diverse areas such as artificial intelligence, distributed systems, knowledge management, programming languages and information retrieval.

PRIIA 2000 is a workshop on intelligent information agents held on 29 August 2000 in Melbourne, Australia, in conjunction with PRICAI 2000. PRIIA is a forum for intelligent information agent researchers in Pacific Rim countries to exchange and discuss their research results. We received an interesting collection of papers, the accepted papers of which can be roughly categorized into two streams: 1. The Role of Reasoning in Information Agents, and 2. Web-Based Information Agents in the Future.

In the first stream, Raymond et al. present a logical basis for agents to revise their beliefs about their users’ changing information needs. Kriaa et al. and Zhang et al. present agent-based methods to reason about and analyse complex systems. Each provided an example, a system for emergency health care and a system for product life cycle cost prediction, respectively. Heinze et al. propose the perception module as a key component in designing and building agent systems.

Papers in the second stream describe four different technologies, all useful for information agents of the future: 3Dvisualization of Web structure (Hiraishi et al.), strong migration of logic programming based mobile agents to enable backtracking to continue across different hosts (Fukuta et al.), constructing agents by constructing knowledge bases (Gao et al.), and user profile management for the wireless environment using agents (Pils et al.). We have also an invited paper from Harold Boley which discusses mappings between RDF (W3C’s recommended standard for structured information) and logic programming, and visualization of RDF descriptions as hypergraphs. We would like to thank all the authors who submitted papers to the workshop and participated in the interesting discussions at the workshop. We would also like to thank the program committee.