A virtual e-retailing environment in GOLEM

We present a prototype multi-agent system whose goal is to support a 3D application for e-retailing. The prototype demonstrates how the use of agent environments can be amongst the most promising and flexible approaches to engineer e-retailing applications. We illustrate this point by showing how the agent environment GOLEM uses semantic Web concepts to develop the e-retailing application. In this context we describe the features of GOLEM that allow a user to become an avatar and explore the environment by searching and dynamically discovering new products and services.