A multi-agent infrastructure for developing personalized Web-based systems

Although personalization and ubiquity are key properties for on-line services, they challenge the development of these systems due to the complexity of the required architectures. In particular, the current infrastructures for the development of personalized, ubiquitous services are not flexible enough to accommodate the configuration requirements of the various application domains. To address such issues, highly configurable infrastructures are needed. In this paper, we describe Seta2000, an infrastructure for the development of recommender systems that support personalized interactions with their users and are accessible from different types of devices (e.g., desktop computers and mobile phones). The Seta2000 infrastructure offers a built-in recommendation engine, based on a multi-agent architecture. Moreover, the infrastructure supports the integration of heterogeneous software and the development of agents that can be configured to offer specialized facilities within a recommender system, but also to dynamically enable and disable such facilities, depending on the requirements of the application domain. The Seta2000 infrastructure has been exploited to develop two prototypes: SeTA is an adaptive Web store personalizing the recommendation and presentation of products in the Web. INTRIGUE is a personalized, ubiquitous information system suggesting attractions to possibly heterogeneous tourist groups.