Software Agents

Amblit Navigator has fully integrated all MS Agent characters (Microsoft and third parties)… When enabled, they will speak and listen to you. For example, have James, above, read you the news… (Tip: Only use characters whose file size is greater than 1 Mb. for best effect.)

Amblit Navigator extensively uses a variety of Software Agents to perform individual user requests.

Software Agents

Software Agents are computer programs that have specialized purpose and routinely visit one or more web sites in the execution of their assigned tasks. For example, Google uses software agents (aka, “spiders”) to periodically visit all the published web sites and extract the information that we use when we search for something on the Internet.

The benefit of these types of software agents is that the knowledge and service providers do not have to do anything special or extra to advertise their offerings. They simply publish their web site address, announcing that they are open for service, and software agents come and catalog those parts of the offering that are of interest to the particular master.

There are three downsides to this approach:

  1. Multiple software agents visit the web site and collect the same information, needlessly using computer and network resources.
  2. The software agent only collects what is of interest to it, and not necessary of interest to the knowledge and service provider, or the ultimate user of the knowledge or service. Furthermore, the provider has no control as to when or if his web site is visited.
  3. Each web site uses their own specialized approach for presenting their knowledge and services, primarily for human beings. These approaches are often quite difficult for a preprogrammed software agent to understand much less describe. Hence, the reason for the Semantic Web initiative described above.

For more information, here are three (3) web sites:

  • Key university research site: Carnagie Mellon;s The Intelligent Software Agents Lab (http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~softagents/).
  • AgentWeb was started sometime early in 1995 and contains extensive information, resources newsletters and mailing lists relating to intelligent information agents, intentional agents, software agents, softbots, knowbots, infobots, etc and is maintained by UMBC’s Laboratory for Advanced Information Technology (http://agents.umbc.edu).
  • BotSpot maintains list of available software robots (http://www.botspot.com).