Visual Interfaces for the Development of Event-based Web Agents in the IRobot System

Timely integration and analysis of information from the World-Wide Web is important for businesses and startups, especially to cope with the increasing global competition need. Manual Web data analysis is time consuming and error prone, while developing automated algorithms is nontrivial even for expert Web programmers. We argue that an event-based architecture that couples Web-agent technology with visual-programming methodology is ideal for Web-data analysis. We demonstrate this with the IRobot system, which uses visual interfaces to facilitate the design of eventbased intelligent Web agents for data integration. The system is effective in both its ability to capture human-oriented Web procedures and its flexibility in modeling complex agents that meet human goals.