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Personal agents are an important advance in the management of electronic information. Accurate user profiling is critical to the personalisation of agent-based services. In this paper we describe a framework for personal agents, which provides a range of services using a common user profile. The user profile is automatically learned from observation of the electronic documents a user reads, and tracks user interests over time. We report on a large trial of this framework, which has given us important insights into the effectiveness of personal agent applications. In particular we discuss the benefits obtained from the use of a common profile and the interoperation of several personal agent applications.

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The Internet is a vast, semi-structured information repository that is expanding ever-faster with two alarming results. First, finding information is becoming increasingly difficult, and second, the management of such information resources is also becoming more complex. We have developed an Intelligent Distributed Information Management System (IDIoMS) to solve these problems. IDIoMS provides a comprehensive set of tools for personalized information delivery, and a platform that enables straightforward management of distributed information resources using agent technologies. These agents enable the sharing, management, search, and presentation of useful information that is widely distributed over a network such as the Internet. IDIoMS benefits users through the automatic provision of timely and relevant information with minimal need for users to search for that information. In addition, the system also benefits service providers through the plug-and-play provision of information services that minimizes the overhead needed to make their service widely available. This paper describes the concept and the architecture of IDIoMS and discusses its utility through three field trials.

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