"Servizi Telematici Adattativi" is a three years project sponsored by Telecom Italia within the "Cantieri Multimediali" initiative, which involves three Italian Universities and has the goal of promoting activities on different areas of multimedia services.
The agreement between the University of Torino (Dipartimento di Informatica) and Telecom Italia for the project "Servizi Telematici Adattativi" was signed on February 1997. The project formally started on May 1, 1997.
The main goal of this project is the design and development of a prototype to support sales in virtual shops, focusing on the individualisation of the interaction with the system users, i.e. on tailoring the interaction with customers to their preferences and needs.
This has recently become a hot topic of research, as a consequence of the quick and world-wide expansion of Internet; in fact, lots of virtual malls and shops exist and are accessed by heterogeneous users, with different experience, who may need support to explore the catalogues and select the products for purchase.
In order to approach the overall goal mentioned above, more specific goals have been identified and the ongoing work is driven by these goals.
In particular:
- The virtual store architecture has to be based on a technology that enables a generic Internet user to access the virtual store, without imposing severe restrictions on the needed equipment type (e.g. no restrictions have to be imposed on the computer and browser used to connect to the store).
- The prototype should be configurable to a certain extent, in order to create multiple instances of virtual stores, selling products belonging to different domains. In general, the system will be suited to domains where fairly complex products are massively sold to users: in fact, in those domains, non-expert customers need special support to take their decisions.
- The virtual store must adapt the presentation of products to the user, varying the type and the amount of information to be provided on the basis of her/his interests and domain expertise. The virtual store also should adapt the selection of products to the user's preferences, suggesting those most suited to her/his needs.
- The system should take the initiative during the interaction with the user, actively guiding her/him in the exploration of the store, in the selection of items and possibly also in the configuration of complex products.
In order to be fully co-operative, the system should take the initiative also in cases where the user does not explicitly ask for that.
- Dynamic user modelling techniques have to be adopted, in order to acquire a description of the user's preferences and expertise, and to update it when more information is collected while interacting with her/him.
The functionalities offered by the prototype are directed to three main targets:
a) The customer visiting the virtual store.
b) The store manager, who updates the product database (e.g. to change the cost of an item) and performs updates to the store, such as deciding which items to put in the store window.
c) The information provider, who provides the technical support in order to configure and set up a new store.
For each of the above targets, the prototype will offer a proper interface with the system, in order to allow the user to work in a friendly environment.
A first prototype of the system is expected at the end of the first year (april 1998): the functionalities included in this version regard the interaction with the customers visiting a virtual store selling phone equipment (phones, answering machines, telefaxes,...).
Agents able to personalise the interaction with the user and the presentation of products according to simple user models are under development.
In particular, the virtual store architecture is composed of a number of agents which interact to manage the working sessions with customers. Several tasks have to be performed to tailor the system's behaviour to the user's needs. For example, it is necessary to collect information about her/his preferences, to select the products most suited to her/him and to dynamically generate the personalized hypertextual pages. These activities are complex, require specific expertise and must be carried on in parallel, during the interaction:
for this reason, we have defined a multiagent architecture where the tasks are distributed: each agent offers a specific set of services and knows which ones are offered by the other agents in the architecture. The architecture includes the following agents:
- The Session Manager is the interface between the virtual store and the Web; it manages a multi-user access to the virtual store, creating a new instance of the store for each user session.
- The Dialog Manager handles the interaction with the user, keeping the dialog context.
- The User Modelling Component maintains and updates the User Model, where specific information about the user's tastes, preferences and domain expertise is kept in order to tailor the interaction to her needs.
- The Personalization Agent dynamically generates the HTML pages to be shown to the user; these pages are produced when required by the Dialog Manager and are personalized to the user's preferences and needs.
- The Product Extractor maintains a personalized view on the overall taxonomy representing the product types available in the store; moreover, this agent performs the accesses to the Users and Products Databases, where the descriptions of customers and products are kept in a permanent easy.
- The Configuration Agent, that analyses the user's needs and helps her/him with the selection of a suitable product configuration, pointing out problems regarding her proposed solutions and suggesting alternative options.
The main result obtained in 1997 was the definition of the overall architecture of the virtual store, with the implementation of a kernel for every agent of the architecture and the realization of the basic communication mechanisms between them. We have explored in detail the technical aspects related with agent communication: our system's architecture can be described as a Three Tier Application, which is a popular approach for Web-based Applications. The first tier of such an application can use any number of Java-enabled browsers. Complex user interface tasks are handled by Java applets downloaded from the second tiers servers, while simpler tasks are handled using standard HTML, dynamically generated.
The second tier of such a system consists of Servlets which encapsulate the rules and logic of our virtual store.
The third tier consists of data repositories and is accessed using a relational database interface based on JDBC.
Our store is based on the JavaSoft Java Web Server 1.0.1, which is one of the Web servers offering the Servlet API. Servlets are very useful to extend servers capabilities and suit the needs of building a Web based store: in particular, we have exploited their capability of handling multiple requests concurrently, so that our Session Manager has been implemented as a Servlet.
The agents of the architecture are Java objects and communicate with each other by exchanging messages based on typical agent communication primitives.
In our implementation, the Database Manager, that manages the Users and
Products databases, runs on a NT machine, while the bulk of our system has been developed and runs on a Unix workstation.
The design and development of a system satisfying the goals of the project "Servizi Telematici Adattativi" requires various types of expertise, which range from background experience on Human-Computer Interaction, to User Modelling techniques, Intelligent Agents, Telematics, Cooperative work, Natural Language Processing, Knowledge Based Systems.
A group of researchers has joined their expertise in order to cover most of the above competence and a team has been established with fellowships funded by TELECOM for the activity of R&D.
In particular the organisation of the project is the following
