RSS WinterFest

18733 Resource 214 24 21 1072738172047 1074636039449 Controlled And BTW, You're Going To Need This Knowledge...

Agent technology has come a long way, but now we need to apply it for specific business value.

When we started MyST Technology Partners, we frequently made the comment that important information should find us instead of us always searching for it. The first overt instance of that capability came when we implemented SmartPoints - additional search results that indicate who is likely to know the most about a search topic and what channels are likely to hold more information about a search topic. This is pretty compelling when you first start playing with it (the <A href="../../mysmartchannels/welcome" target=_blank>free public site</A> provides this capability). "in the last two decades there has been increasing attention on a new set of problems those dealing with the interactions between multiple computational entities" -- <A href="http://www.aois.org/99/laufmann.html" target=_blank>Steven C. Laufmann</A> This is an important indication of a shift that is driven in part by the increasing volume of information that we have to deal with as well as the drive to create content that is machine readable. At no time in computing history have companies agreed on semantic tagging standards until now. Large software firms that are at each others throats have concluded that supporting XML open standards are key to the future of successful computing strategies. This has now paved the way for significant advancement in terms of agent technologies. Of greater interest is the idea that agents can work on your behalf to retrieve information in advance of you needing it. This sounds AI'ish, but it really isn't that difficult or far-fetched. With Web services architectures it's now possible to gather additional information relevant to some activity immediately after the activity has begun. An example of this can be found at <A href="http://blueskycolorado.com/" target=_blank>blueskycolorado.com</A>. As content writers create articles about outdoor activity, queries into <A href="http://amazon.com/" target=_blank>Amazon.com</A> are dynamically updated to include the keywords of the articles. We use the Amazon API to make real-time requests for visitors - so, as new material is added, the system naturally maps the interests of the writers to books that are relavant - all in real-time. I'm not an expert on agent technologies, but I know one when I experience one. ;-) I experienced the benefit of an agent just this morning when I reviewed my RSS feeds from six channels that are being updated every 12 hours by a "channel gear". A channel gear is an agent designed to keep a collection of content about a specific subject up to date based on what Google is aware of. This (among the many machineries) is largely unknown about the MyST platform - we have an agent scripting mechanism that doesn't require any expertise about the Google API or the MyST API. As a business content expert, I'm able to script instructions that carry out the steps of finding information and updating target channels. But to really make this approach dance, the agents that harvest important content for me are supported by another type of agent - an <A href="http://blogspace.com/rss/readers" target=_blank>RSS reader</A>. A good example of this can be found on the <A href="../../mysmartchannels/public/blog/15397">RSS WinterFest Site</A>. The content items in the RSS Radar section are all automated queries against Google, but they also include RSS feed addresses. My hope is that as we continue to build new information systems that seem instinctively aware of activities surrounding you, the system will naturally invoke behaviors that essentially say "And BTW, I retrieved this information because you'll be needing it." If you have an interesting application where this might be useful, <A href="mailto:bfrench@myst-technology.com" target=_blank>give us a shout</A>. 9 application/xml false agent technology agents information access software agent RSS WinterFest http://myst-technology.com/mysmartchannels/public/blog/15397 Toward Agent-Based Software Engineering for Information Access Applications http://www.aois.org/99/laufmann.html Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 1.0.3705; .NET CLR 1.1.4322) 68.42.141.35 68.42.141.35 aseidl false true false false true 190014 false false true false false false true 214 blog blogsite/MySTHome/web