Toolkits for a Distributed, Agent-based Web Commerce System

Electronic commerce is a rapidly growing area accompanied by the growth of the Internet and the World Wide Web. As information on the Internet becomes more dynamic and heterogeneous , `software agents' have been touted as the new building blocks for a new Internet structure. We foresee a future whereby the Web is populated with as many software agents (involved in electronic commerce and other activities) as there are web documents today. Organizations will not only establish web presence via web sites alone, they will also provide agents to interact with other agents. Our agent-based web commerce project investigates issues in building the infrastructure for such a large scale, distributed, agent-based web commerce system. Our approach is to provide toolkits for users to create and customize buyer and seller agents quickly. This paper describes our preliminary work in the engineering of such buyer and seller toolkits.