A Semiotic Approach to the Design of Agent-mediated E-commerce Systems

The emergence of the Internet and electronic commerce (or e-commerce) has opened up a new dimension for conducting business. Incorporating agent technology into e-commerce systems has brought even more potential to the improvement of efficiency and effectiveness of business systems. While the work and technology of agent-mediated e-commerce starts to benefit the industry and economy, much research in the theory, methods and technologies is needed to achieve the return of value of e-commerce in a larger scale. In agent-mediated e-commerce systems, issues such as the delegation of authorities from a human user to a machine agent need to be dealt with. Also, for agents to communicate with one another, there is a need for techniques for specifying a common vocabulary of terms to be used.