Agent-based digital libraries: driving the information economy

Exploiting the enormous potential of the Internet will require distributed, scaleable, self-optimising software tools that are capable of pro-actively adapting their behaviour to meet the requirements of users with differing skills, interests, and objectives. We argue that an appropriate framework for building such software tools is that of an information economy, in which computational agents carry out the roles of information producer consumer and broker. We further argue that the emerging technology of intelligent agents and multi-agent systems provides the technological foundation upon which to implement such information economies, and provide the rich personalised information retrieval, management, and sharing services required to exploit the Internet. We illustrate our argument by describing, as a case study, the Zuno Digital Library (ZUNODL), a commercial framework for building commercial digital libraries