An agent architecture for personalized Web stores

We describe the architecture of a configurable Web store supporting personalized interactions with users. Our system exploits user modeling and flexible hypermedia techniques to tailor to the user the suggestion of goods and the description of the store catalog. Customizing the system's behavior requires the parallel execution of several complex tasks during the interaction (e.g. identifying the user's preferences and dynamically generating the hypertextual pages of the store catalog). We argue that only an architecture composed of specialized agents can successfully carry on these tasks. \newline Our system is developed in a Java-based environment using tools for building interoperable, agent-based systems (e.g. JDBC drivers for database independence; Voyager for the multiagent architecture). The system architecture includes an instance of each specialized agent and an agent which enables the communication among the others.