Web Sites as Agents' Environments: General Framework and Applications

A web site presents an intrinsic graph–like spatial structure defined by pages connected by hyperlinks. This structure may represent an environment on which agents related to visitors of the web site are positioned and moved in order to track their navigation. To consider this structure and to keep track of these movements allows to monitor the site and visitors, in order to support the enhancement of the site itself through forms of adaptivity, but also to introduce new forms of interaction among registered visitors. This paper presents a model supporting the collection of information related to user’s behaviour in a web site, and an application supporting the proposal of hyperlinks based on the history of user’s movement in the web site environment. Moreover the paper briefly describes a system implementing a context-aware form of interaction, supporting the communication among visitors of a web site through the exploitation of its structure.