Chapter XI Agent-Mediated Knowledge Acquisition for User Profiling

This chapter presents a tool for knowledge acquisition for user profiling in electronic commerce. The knowledge acquisition in e-commerce is a challenging task that requires specific tools in order to facilitate the knowledge transfer from the user to the system. The proposed tool is based on a hierarchical user model and is agent-based. The architecture of the tool incorporates four software agents: processing agent maintaining the user profile, validating agent interacting with the user when information validation is needed, monitoring agent monitoring the effects of the changes made to the user profile, and a filtering agent ensuring the safe information exchange with other software.