An extension of ECA architecture and its application to HTML document browsing

We propose a new agent architecture which is represented by extended ECA (XECA) rules. Conventional ECA rules which consist of descriptors such as “event”, “condition” and “action” are employed in the field of active databases. We propose new descriptors in order to represent the agents´ behavior by ECA rules. These descriptors enable to specify the time constraint of a rule, and express a complex combination of some pairs of condition-action with simple script. In this paper, we show concrete examples of XECA rules to realize Web browsing assistance agents. We discuss two kinds of assistance agents. One is a user profile management agent which constructs the user profile represented by the characteristic keywords and their weights in the Web pages. The other is an information collection agent which automatically collects related information with the user profile. We also show the configuration of a user adaptive browsing system based on the proposed agents