Weblogs: Intelligent Agents

I'm reading the W3C WAI Interest Group mailing list as part of my learning about accessibility. One topic which is closely related to my Intelligent Agent project is accessibility proxies that take inaccessible pages and try to make them accessible. The conversation started with an Open source project idea of "Edapta", so naturally Nick Kew's mod_accessibility got a mention. Charles McCathieNeville mentioned IBM's WBI.

WBI brands itself as a "programmable HTTP proxy" which implements a form of browser memory. So it watches the user as they browse, offering them a toolbar of options. This is exactly what I want my intelligent agent proxy to do. Similarly WBI is now currently implemented in Java, even offering a WBI Development Kit for Java which allows the user to build their own plugins. They've now coined the phrase "Websphere Transcoding Publisher". There's a good intro to WBI in the article titled "The (unofficial) WBI Story".

Where my intelligent agent presumably differs is my requirement that the process works on a handheld computer like a Sharp Zaurus - though whether that will happen I can't say at the moment.

Jorn Barger is at it again, publishing his idea called InfoRaptor. His InfoRaptor which involves keeping a word index of all pages browsed allied with master topic pages to classify the pages. Although the problem with Bargers' solution - partly to do with Barger himself - is the complete lack of semantic structure. Jorn Barger doesn't believe in structured content on the web - its an attitude typical amongst invididuals involved in Artificial Intelligence that because structured markup can't do absolutely everything, it cannot be used in any form - so he loses out on the simple benefits of structure. Of course, I look forward to evaluating his idea when its implemented, with great interest.

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