Inclusion of reference agents in a virtual reference environment

Agents have been used to support a great diversity of tasks in digital libraries such as those related with services or information management. This paper describes the role of agents we have termed "reference agents" in a virtual reference environment which has been designed to support collaboration and reuse of knowledge. We include a brief description of this system, a characterization of reference agents and some previous results of their operation. We also propose the use of ontologies as an alternative to deal with keywords ambiguity.