Deploying Information Agents on the Web

The information resources on the Web are vast, but much of the Web is based on a browsing paradigm that requires someone to actively seek information. Instead, one would like to have information agents that continuously attend to one's personal information needs. Such agents need to be able to extract the relevant information from web sources, integrate data across sites, and execute efficiently in a networked environment. In this paper I describe the technologies we have developed to rapidly construct and deploy information agents on the Web. This includes wrapper learning to convert online sources into agent-friendly resources, query planning and record linkage to integrate data across different sites, and streaming dataflow execution to efficiently execute agent plans. I also describe how we applied this work within the Electric Elves project to deploy a set of agents for continuous monitoring of travel itineraries. We have developed a set of core technologies to simplify the task of building intelligent agents for gathering and monitoring information on the Web [Knoblock et al, 2003; 2001; Barish and Knoblock, 2()02al. The technologies include the ability to gather information from the Web, to link that information with related information, to build plans to integrate the various sources of data, and to efficiently execute these plans in the Web environment. We have applied these technologies to build agents for a variety of applications [Barish et al, 2000; Ambite et a/., 20021, including an application for monitoring travel plans from online sources. Researchers have developed a variety of agents that have been deployed on the Web over the years. Some notable systems include the Internet Softbot [Etzioni and Weld, 1994], an agent that interacts with a range of Internet resources, BargainFinder [Krulwich, 19961, a comparison shopping agent for CDs, ShopBot [Perkowitz et a/., 19971, a system for automatically locating and incorporating new stores into a comparison shopping agent, and Warren [Decker et al, 1997], a system for gathering data on a financial portfolio. There has also been a significant amount of research on the underlying technologies required for developing agents on the Internet [Levy and Weld, 2000]. As noted by Etzioni [1996], the Web provides a tremendous opportunity for building intelligent software agents. Yet, surprisingly few have seized this opportunity. This is almost certainly because there are many technical issues that must be addressed to build such agents. Our work is designed to address these issues and simplify the task of building agents for the Web. In this paper I first describe an example set of agents for monitoring travel plans. Then 1 will briefly describe the technologies that we have developed to gather data from web sources, link data across sources, generate plans to integrate the data, and efficiently execute these plans. Finally, I present directions for future research and conclusions. 2 Information Agents for Monitoring Travel As part of the Electric Elves project [Chalupsky et a/., 2001; Ambite et al., 20021 we have applied our agent technologies to build a set of agents for various tasks including tracking visitor schedules, monitoring meeting schedules, and monitoring a user's travel plans. In the case of monitoring travel plans, this task is particularly well-suited for applying agent technology for several reasons: a) this is a fairly compli1580 INVITED SPEAKERS