References A directory agent helps buyer agents locate seller agents. It obtains the network address of diverse seller agents by searching the Web and stores the address and information of the products sold at these addresses. Given a buyer agent's query, it responds with relevant information ranked according to a user's preferences. Structure of a directory agent Figure 4 shows the inner structure of a directory agent.
Web robots search the web and archive up to date information of seller agents and products.
The Integration module integrates information collected by the robots. During integration, a directory agent keeps mapping tables storing the correspondence between the integrated description and the individual descriptions. The results of the queries are passed to the Ranking mechanism , which ranks the results according to their relevance to the buyer's query. Inc. All Rights Reserved.