The group has been working on the topic of software agents for about a decade, based on the experience from knowledge engineering and extending the scope of the research area. This page gives an overview of this journey, with short descriptions and links to the projects that constitute its stepstones. I3 stands for Intelligent Information Interfaces. The parrot realises the bridge between a virtual world, inhabited by software agents and the physical world, inhabited by human agents wanting support in an information-rich context. The question that this research addresses is that of how agents may improve the coordination between their actions, and how a system of communication that aids this coordination may come about.
Communication consists of concepts created by agents in reaction to their particular environment.
In order to benefit from the information that is communicated, agents need to adapt their behavior, since the meaning of signals depends on the conceptualizations used by other agents and is subject to continuous change. During the past years, the goal of our research on software agents was to develop agent architectures that operate on Internet and use Mosaic-like interfaces. We have also been working on specific examples of intelligent software agents for flexible presentation of information, navigation through large amounts of distributed information sources on the WWW, follow up and support for administrative procedures, and negotiation. Several demonstrators have been constructed in the areas of electronic commerce and negotiation supported by geographical information services. It is being used for experimentation in dynamic page generation from databases, customisation and agent application.