Interactive knowledge management for agent-assisted web navigation

Web information may currently be acquired by activating search engines. However, our daily experience is not only that web pages are often either redundant or missing but also that there is a mismatch between information needs and the web's responses. If we wish to satisfy more complex requests, we need to extract part of the information and transform it into new interactive knowledge. This transformation may either be performed by hand or automatically. In this article we describe an experimental agent-based framework skilled to help the user both in managing achieved information and in personalizing web searching activity. The first process is supported by a query-formulation facility and by a friendly structured representation of the searching results. On the other hand, the system provides a proactive support to the searching on the web by suggesting pages, which are selected according to the user's behavior shown in his navigation activity. A basic role is played by an extension of a classical fuzzy-clustering algorithm that provides a prototype-based representation of the knowledge extracted from the web. These prototypes lead both the proactive suggestion of new pages, mined through web spidering, and the structured representation of the searching results. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Int J Int Syst 22: 1101–1122, 2007.