Creating an Open Agent Environment for Context-Aware M-Commerce

In this paper, we introduce MyCampus, an agent-based environment for context-aware mobile services, which we are in the process of developing and validating on Carnegie Mellon University’s campus. The environment revolves around a growing collection of customizable agents capable of (semi-) automatically discovering and accessing user personal resources (e.g. calendar, location tracking functionality, food preferences) and Web services as they assist their users in carrying out different tasks such as planning an evening out, organizing a study group or filtering incoming messages. The openness of the MyCampus architecture directly derives from a set of ontologies for describing personal resources, contextual attributes, user preferences and web services. Contextual information and other personal details about a user are accessed via a Semantic e-Wallet, subject to access privileges set by the user. Over time, the user can pull new agents into her context and assume that these agents will automatically be able to discover and access relevant contextual information and personal details. Similarly, service ontologies facilitate the introduction of new Web services by allowing agents to (semi-)automatically discover and access them. Such openness could one day play a key role in helping create a more leveled playing field for producers of Web services. It could also open the door to new markets for a wide variety of simple, task-specific agents capable of automatically adapting to their user’s context and preferences.