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Technical Report
Sidekick: A Personal Agent for the Semantic Web
December 1, 2002
The Semantic Web is a vision for simplifying and improving knowledge reuse on the Web. It is all set to alter how humans benefit from the Web, from active interaction to somewhat passive use, through the proliferation of software agents and, in particular, personal assistants that can function and thrive on the Semantic Web more effectively than on the conventional Web. Agents can parse, understand, and reason about information available on Semantic Web pages to meet users’ needs. Such personal assistants will be driven by rules, axioms, and the internal model or profile that the agents have inside them for the user. An intrinsic and important prerequisite for a personal assistant or, rather, any agent is to manipulate information available on the Semantic Web in the form of ontologies, axioms, and rules written in various semantic markup languages. In this paper, a model architecture for such a personal assistant, which we call Sidekick, that deals with real-world semantic markup is described. The agent reasons with semantic markup written in DAML+OIL, using the Java Expert System Shell (JESS) as the reasoning engine. This software assistant views information providers on the Semantic Web as recommender agents with a limited view of the user’s preferences and improves personalization by collaborating with peer personal assistants (referred to as buddy agents) within communities the user has identified as trusted parties to exchange information with. Collaboration is achieved through simple solicitation and recommendation of information with these buddy agents.
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