The system is shown in Fig. 1. There are Personal User Agents, Knowledgebase Agents and Linkbase Agents, each of which has a specific purpose. Personal User Agent. In principle, Personal User agents follow a single user, accumulating information about their interests and expertise and storing this data in a user model. At present, this model is simply made up of key value pairs entered manually by the user.
Agents also add keywords to the model that have been extracted from web pages visited by the user.
This model is then sent to the Knowledge Base Agent. The Knowledgebase agent acts as a central repository for data accumulated by personal agents. The knowledge base agent provides an interface to this data allowing other users to query the information via a web browser. Acting as a distributed link service, the linkbase agent maintains a local linkbase and provides performatives to other agents allowing them to query the linkbase and add or remove links. At present, the Linkbase Agent only responds to requests from Personal Agents for URLs.