Just-in-time information retrieval agents

A just-in-time information retrieval agent (JITIR agent) is software that proactively retrieves and presents information based on a person's local context in an easily accessible yet nonintrusive manner. This paper describes three implemented JITIR agents: the Remembrance Agent, Margin Notes, and Jimminy. Theory and design lessons learned from these implementations are presented, drawing from behavioral psychology, information retrieval, and interface design. They are followed by evaluations and experimental results. The key lesson is that users of JITIR agents are not merely more efficient at retrieving information, but actually retrieve and use more information than they would with traditional search engines. I n this paper, just-in-time information retrieval agents (JITIR agents) are introduced. JITIR agents (pronounced " jitter agents ") are a class of software agents that proactively present information based on a person's context in an easily accessible and non-intrusive manner. They continuously watch a per-son's environment and present information that may be useful without requiring any action on the part of the user. The environment that an agent looks at is usually computational: e-mail, a Web page that a person is reading, or a document that he or she is writing. However, it can also be a person's physical environment as sensed by a hand-held or wearable computer. The information a JITIR agent provides can come from any number of preindexed databases of documents, e.g., e-mail archives, notes files, or documents from commercial databases such as the INSPEC collection of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) technical paper abstracts. A key feature of a JITIR agent is that it can provide information from an unordered set of documents ; no hand-coding of documents or special domain dependent techniques are required. This feature makes it easy to adapt systems to new domains and information sources. The word " agent " has many different definitions. JITIR agents are " software agents " in that they are long-lived, watch an environment, and can take action based on that environment without direct user intervention. They should not be confused with " embodied conversational agents " or synthetic characters , which are graphical interactive characters that present a personality and interact with a user in an animistic way. They should also not be confused with distributed agent architectures or agent-oriented programming models, which are both architectures for software design rather than a class of applications. Unless specified, all references to the word …