Information Overload, Information Agents, and E-Commerce A Review of Intelligent Information Agents: Agent-Based Information Discovery and Management on the Internet (ed. by M. Klusch, Berlin, Germany: Springer-Verlag, 1999)

The unprecedented growth of information technology has made numerous Web resources instantly accessible to various user communities. The emergence of the Internet also has significantly increased the scope and scale of data distribution. As a result, from the user's point of view, it is becoming increasingly difficult to search for and retrieve desired information from the large number of information sources. Confronting this challenge of information overload, users need assistance to identify the most interesting and valuable information, enabling savings of money and time. Intelligent agents for the Internet can provide such assistance. Among the many recent technical innovations associated with e-commerce, we have seen the emergence of information agents, which have been created to meet these needs and manage the explosive growth of information on the Internet (Jennings and Wooldridge, 1998).Verlag, 1999), has brought together a broad range of state-of-the-art research on advanced systems, methods, and tools of information agent technology. He defines intelligent information agents as autonomous, computational software entities that provide proactive resource discovery, that resolve information impediments for information consumers and providers, and that offer value-added information services and products. Klusch, similar to Jennings and Wooldridge (1998) and other authors, further categorizes the agents into several classes according to their functionality characteristics: cooperative or non-cooperative, adaptive, rational, and mobile. Based on his classification shown in Table 1, I will analyze and explore the relevance of information agents in more detail.