Task-Structure Based Mediation: The Travel-Planning Assistant Example

As the number of applications available on the World Wide Web (WEB) increases at a rapid speed, an enormous number of resources become available to the general public. These resources offer information and services in a variety of domains but are often difficult to use due to their idiosyncratic domain and interaction models. In this paper, we discuss a multi-agent architecture for integration of WEB applications within a domain, based on a task-structure approach. The architecture consists of a set of wrapper agents, driving and extracting information from a set of corresponding WEB applications, and a mediator agent, whose task structure drives both its interaction with the users and its communication with the wrappers. We illustrate this architecture with the description of a travel-planning assistant that supports the users in an exploratory, least-commitment search be-