Intelligent infomediary for web financial information

The World Wide Web is the most popular information dissemination channel in the world. Such information space grows by an estimation of at least 10% every month. Many newspapers take the advantage to expand their services by providing real time electronic versions of news information on the Web in contrast to the traditional ‘‘ink-on-paper’’ newspapers. The timely financial news is very important for decision-making of investors. However, the tremendous amount of information releasing simultaneously creates the problem of information overloading, which reduces the decision-making capabilities significantly. As most of the investors are not experienced users of information retrieval systems, they spend extensive amount of time to identify the relevant information. Software agents act as intermediaries between the users and the information providers to notify users of recently published relevant information. In this paper, we present an intelligent agent that monitors the posting of the Web information providers and utilizes user profiles and user feedback to learn user preference and search for the Chinese Web financial information on behalf of users. D 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.