In today’s brave new Internet world, a newer form of software, called intelligent agents, offers people the potential to navigate and utilize Web-based information resources more effectively and efficiently than ever before. Intelligent agents are software programs that act on behalf of users to find and filter information, negotiate for services, automate complex tasks, and collaborate with other agents to solve complex problems (AgentBuilder, 2000). Agents perform these tasks continuously and autonomously in particular environments often inhabited by other agents and processes (Shoham, 1997, pp. 271-72). The use of agents has been well-documented in the electronic commerce domain (Maes, 2001; 1994; Maes, Guttman & Moukas, 1999; Rahman & Bignall, 2001), especially in terms of industrial, commercial, medical, and entertainment applications (Jennings & Wooldridge, 1998). With the advent of the Semantic Web proposed by Tim Berners-Lee, agents are envisioned to play a more significant role in the near future (Port, 2002; Berners-Lee, Hendler & Lassila, 2001). Given the importance and rise of this newer form of software, agent toolkits are becoming more of a necessity to help build, re-use, and deploy intelligent agents. As such, agent toolkits are being introduced and incorporated in the curriculums of post-secondary education courses geared to train the next generation of electronic commerce managers and programmers. To gain insight on the current landscape of agent toolkits available on the market and their use in post-secondary education courses, a project was conducted by the authors from June 2001 to April 2002. Data collection and analysis involved the download and trial use of 20 agent toolkits, as well as the recruitment of 87 post-secondary course instructors across the globe to answer a Web-based questionnaire concerning instructor satisfaction with agent toolkit use in the classroom. This paper reports on the project’s findings.
đang được dịch, vui lòng đợi..