Students : Pak Chun Pun, Shum Siu Hong Supervisor : Prof. Lochovsky Frederick H.

  

The World Wide Web (WWW) is a vast information medium that is growing at an extremely rapid rate, both in number of sites and in volume of information. People always feel lost and disoriented when navigating the Internet. In this project, a WWW search agent has been developed. It is a kind of vertical information searching tool on the Internet which is able to search for, analyze, and integrate book-sale information from different cyber-bookstores. It helps people to find the most relevant and best price book among online bookstores.   The internal mechanism of the search agent is as follows:

 

The WWW search agent is goal-oriented. Users are only required
	to fill in a simple request form for a certain book. The search agent will collect the most relevant and best price book-sale information records from different online bookstores in real time. The resulting book-sale information will then finally be integrated and ranked into a clear web report based on the user's request. The WWW search agent is a real-time searching machine. It always returns to the user the
most up-to-date information in the shortest time. In addition, the
WWW search agent is collaborative. It has the ability to perform requirements relaxation. Those book-sale information records that the user may be interested in can be returned as well even though they are no specified in the user's request. The WWW search agent is not only able to retrieve all relevant book-sale information records, it

 

	is also able to perform specific tasks on the extracted information. The tasks include to cluster similar items, customize different formatted book-sale information in the sameway, match relevant delivery service scheme to the record, filter
out irrelevant records, and rank the book-sale Information into the user's specified order.   Nowadays, people can access the Internet through Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) mobile phone. However, the transmission rate of WAP is very slow (maximum 9.6kbps) and the
screen on a WAP mobile phone is very small. We cannot get too much information and too complicated web page from the WWW. A WWW search Agent is a reasonably good interface for WAP mobile phone to access the Internet. It always returns only a small amount of, but rather precise, information to the user.