Browsing Agents: Automated Browsing of Distributed Information

摘要

This paper describes a toolkit for finding and remembering information in a distributed environment of rapidly-changing information sources. In these conditions users often expend significant amounts of effort searching for useful documents and objects, only to find that their information quickly becomes out-of-date and they need to start all over again. Browsing agents are designed to minimise this wasted effort by helping users to create and execute complex queries that mimic many aspects of browsing and searching. The queries may be stored and repeated later without user intervention.