Chrysalis: User Agents in the Construction of Floristic Digital Libraries

User agents are the basis for an emerging style of human-computer interaction. This paper describes an agent-assisted approach to the construction of floristic digital libraries, which consist of very large botanical data repositories and related services. In the proposed environment, termed Chrysalis, authors of plant morphologic descriptions can enter data into a digital library via a web-based editor. An agent that runs concurrently with the editor suggests potentially useful morphologic descriptions based on similar documents existing in the library. Benefits derived from the introduction of Chrysalis include reduced potential for errors and data inconsistencies, increased parallelism among descriptions, and considerable savings in the time regularly spent in visually checking for parallelism and manually editing data.