A multi-agent system for collaborative bookmarking

Abstract

Abstract. In this paper we describe a multi-agent system, called COWING that aims at enabling an organised group of people to share their results of information searching on the World Wide Web. Users normally save relevant sites they found in their private collections of bookmarks. The goal of the proposed system is to enable users to share their bookmarks, in an implicit, secure and effective way. By implicit we mean that users are not required to spend extra effort in order to use the system. Secure sharing refers to the capacity of each user to control who knows what about her/his own bookmark collections. Finally effectiveness is ensured by recommending users with relevant bookmarks that are computed by applying a distributed collaborative filtering algorithm. Recommended bookmarks are automatically inserted in the most appropriate bookmark folder in the user's local collection. When accessing a folder the user can evaluate (accept or reject) provided recommendations. Our system is a multi-agent system where each user is associated to an assistant agent, called a WING agent. A WING agent observes the user's behaviour when managing her/his own bookmark collection. It learns how the user classifies her/his bookmarks. A hybrid neural/case-based reasoning supervised classifier is used for this purpose. WING agents exchange bookmarks according to a defined collaboration protocol that protects associated users privacy.Keywords: Collaborative Information Agents, Bookmark, Hybrid Neural/CBR classification. 1.À IntroductionThe most intelligent agents that browse and index sites on the World Wide Web (the Web hereafter) still to be humans. Consequently, an effective way to locate relevant information on the Web is to locate people who are likely to know where to find the searched information [25]. Users usually store addresses of relevant Web sites in a bookmark directory. Almost all Web browsers available today provide users with some bookmaking facility. Typically a bookmark is a record that holds the information like: the site address (i.e. URL), the site title (i.e. the title of the indexed 84 page), and some other data such as bookmark creation date, last visit date and userprovided description of the indexed page. The bookmark set becomes a personal web space that helps the user in land-marking the huge information space composed of the currently available web pages. A major reason behind the popularity of bookmarks is their ease of use. In most browsers a simple click is enough to save the currently visited web page into the list of bookmarks. Later, another simple click on the saved bookmark takes the user directly to the required site. In order to enhance access time to saved bookmarks, most existing bookmarking tools allow users to organise their collections in a hierarchy of folders. While this may effectively enhance the access time, it introduces new problems: "users must continually trade-off the cost of organising their bookmarks and remembering which bookmark are in which folder versus the cost of havi...

Agent and multi-agent applications to support distributed communities of practice: a short review

“…LiMe [99] Elaboration of Newsletters CLELIA [3] Bookmark and Bibliographic CoWing [52] References Management CommunityItemsTool [56] Recommender ACORN [69] Systems/Collaborative [40] and Retrieval Community Search Assistant [35] Implicit [10,11] Web Pages Collaborative Editing PAIS [113] Information Semi-automatic Capture [108] Community Cultivation Community Presence Indicator Social Web Cockpit [41] Agent-Buddy [126] Community Formation / Identification Let's Browse [63] [ [101][102][103][104] Community Organizer [44,127,128] MEMOIR [26] [117]…”

“…The system does not impose extra workload on the users; it allows users to choose who can access their bookmarks, assists users in classifying their bookmarks and recommends interesting bookmarks [52].…”

Reducing cognitive load

“…One of their recommendations is to employ automated filters to improve information reuse and visualization. Kanawati and Malek [22] proposed a collaborative bookmark system, CoWing (Collaborative Web…”