Using agents to personalize the Web

Abstract

Users build personal information spaces (stored as bookmarks, hotlists, or as a personal page of links) as their WWW-subset and interface to access the World-Wide Web. As the WWW is a living OcreatureO that evolves and grows permanently, users have to take care that their personal information spaces can be kept manageable and up-to-date. Our prototype system BASAR (Building Agents Supporting Adaptive Retrieval) provides users with assistance when managing their personal information spaces. This assistance is user-specific and done by software agents called web assistants and active views. Users delegate tasks to web assistants that perform actions on their views of the WWW, on the WWW itself, and on the history of all user actions In this paper, we discuss aspects of the design-evaluationredesign cycle of BASAR by focusing on questionnaires, assessment studies, and system evaluations.