Task-Oriented Restructuring of an Application Domain: A Multi-Agent Architecture for Doing Things in Internet E-Mail

Users are increasingly more mobile, using different e-mail systems in different places. Based on the results of an explorative study of task management in a user’s daily electronic life, and earlier work on information management in e-mail, we begin a restructuring of the domain of Internet email. The purpose is to make it even more suitable for message-based communication in organizations, where many users, groups, and tasks are involved. By introducing the concept of tasks we hypothesize that e-mail can be made more usable for managing short-term interests of a user. We describe a design of a multi-agent architecture that supports the integration of disparate and distributed information sources. Our goal is to combine the information in the sources for the dynamic and automatic construction of classification and prioritization rules. A prototype implementing the architecture is tentatively described, which uses information from the user’s current electronic environment to manage her short-term interests.