a digital library is a library in which collections are stored in digital formats

8/6/2019 A Digital Library is a Library in Which Collections Are Stored in Digital Formats

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Digital libraries represent a powerful new set of tools for preserving, disseminating, and reusingtechnology on a large scale within distributed corporate organizations. Drawing from disciplines

including information retrieval, the Web and library science, digital libraries provide a means forcapturing and preserving design, manufacturing and quality information for complex products

and systems during their lifecycles.

It is concerned with that body ofknowledge relating to the collection,organization,storage, distribution, retrieval, and utilizationofdigital information. Digital

libraries basically store materials in electronic format and manipulate large

collections ofthose materials effectively

Examples of Digital Libraries

Internet Public Libraryhttp://www.ipl.org

New York Public Libraryhttp://digital.nypl.org/

Digital Collection

E-journals E-books Electronic databases

Newspapers F

ull-text articles Reference materials Conversion from printed materials

Introduction

The internet has experienced a rapid shift from information and entertainment to electronic

commerce. The amount of information available on the web, as well as the number of e-businesses and web shoppers, has been growing exponentially and the influx is difficult to

process. A major challenge for marketspace participants has become sifting through an unwieldyamount of information to find products, services, and even each other often relegating e-

commerce a hit or miss experience.

Intelligent agents are a major evolution toward solving this difficult problem. Intelligent agents

empower both buyers and sellers to accomplish e-commerce transactions by enabling efficient,

precise, and comprehensive searches on the vast web community and information repository.Because of user simplicity and thoroughness, intelligent agents enhance user experience and


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satisfaction. By operating in the background in lieu of user intervention, intelligent agents alsocircumvent problems related to slow internet access and free up prohibitively expensive surf

and data mining time.

The technology has evolved and the internet has matured to a point where sophisticated new

generation intelligent agents proliferate. This page examines intelligent agents and their use bybuyers and sellers in the e-commerce marketspace.

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What is an intelligent agent?

Intelligent agents are software applications that have a predefined knowledge base and/or

learning system about their user's goals and wishes and, through adaptive reasoning, use thisinformation to execute their user's request. The concept has been around for many decades,

ranging in functionality from a simple macro with prescriptive directions to new generation

software that truly exhibits learning and artificial intelligence.

The continuum of intelligent agents may be characterized along three dimensions: agency,

intelligence, and mobility. (See Table 1. Three Dimensions of Intelligent Agents.) Agentstypically act independently of the user, learn and adapt from actions or the environment and are

highly mobile and autonomous in their actions. For these reasons, intelligent agents are moreinteractive and can accomplish multiple tasks at a variety of locations. This characteristic

differentiates intelligent agents, making them much more powerful and versatile applicationsthan traditional search engines, spiders, and web crawlers.

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How does it work?

Intelligent agents operate according to a Remote Programming Paradigm, or computer-to-computer programming. Remote programming enables the client (user) to store on the server

(host) not only the procedures but also any accompanying instructions and peripheral data. Eachtime the events specified in the instructions occur, the server calls the procedures and executes

on-site the instructions, without any further intervention from the client computer. As directed,the agent returns the results to the client either at the end of the session with a single host or after

conversing with all hosts in the target community.

The intelligent agent network infrastructure has five components working together: an executionfacility, a communication facility, a transport facility, a packaging facility, and an integrated

security facility. (See Table 2. Intelligent Agent Network Infrastructure.)

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How is it applicable to e-commerce?


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E-commerce has grown at an astounding rate over the last few years and so has the number ofparticipants. Although web business models differ from the traditional brick and mortar models

in many ways, the fundamental needs of consumers and businesses remain much the same:consumers want to comparison shop products and services side by side for the best price;

businesses want to grow sales by driving the right shoppers to their sites. These needs give rise

to a variety of intelligent agents working for buyers and sellers of products and services over theweb.

Buyer agents

According to a recent report from Deloitte Research, online shoppers will routinely useintelligent agents to e-shop by 2002. At that time, more than 70 percent of large companies are

expected to be selling goods online. Rather than getting in a site you never wanted or playing ahit or miss guessing game regarding which keyword search result might match your needs, a

variety of intelligent agents can be sent out by buyers to help locate stores, brands, product orservice categories, products and services, and desired prices. These capabilities will drive a shift

from a web-centric to user-centric e-commerce model, whereby buyers will be empowered tocomparison shop even before going in to one particular seller's site.

Moreover, the buyer agents perform the work without user intervention, thereby simplifying lifewhile improving the end results obtainable by the user. With more efficient and powerful search

capabilities, agents also are expected to help further drive down e-commerce costs and makeweb-shopping more transparent. These effects will make e-commerce increasingly attractive to

reluctant consumers, since convenience, costs, and on-the-fly availability of peripheralinformation are the major hooks of the digital marketplace.

Seller agents

In turn, buyer agents affect how vendors on the web need to operate their online businesses. In

a more competitive and transparent marketplace, vendors of products and services on the webwill need to hone and logically organizate their information so that buyer agents will be

attracted. Sellers can use intelligent agents to track demand and market share changes, engage incompetitive knowledge mining, and even learn through collaboration from buyer agents.

Learning agents deployable by sellers are less obtrusive and typically receive greater acceptancethan filtering agents that require users to make ratings and answer lots of questions.

These capabilities mean new a era in e-commerce, not easily replicated in the brick and mortarsenvironment: mass personalization. Agents enable businesses to efficiently gain intelligence on

the market to create personalized relationships with every single one of its customers. Thus, e-businesses have the advantage of being about to use intelligent agents to present the perfect sales

pitch. To do so, businesses will need to deploy a team of seller agents in a multi-agent system.Multi-agent systems comprised of buyer and seller intelligent agents are essential to open digital

marketspaces, given the many dynamic roles driving transactions. Buyers may need decisionagents to comparison shop, while sellers may need a broker, provider, and merchant agent to sell

a product. More sophisticated seller agents also may negotiate with and learn from buyer agents.


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Intelligent agents are a member of the bot familysoftware programs that operate unattended,usually on the Internet. Therefore, agents are sometimes referred to as bots. Individuals or

organizations use intelligent agents to perform functions or tasks that otherwise would involvehuman interaction or repetition. Operating independently on behalf of their users, some

intelligent agents mimic human behavior and thought processes and are able to make decisions,

learn, and interact with other intelligent agents. Intelligent agents come in stationary and mobilevarieties, meaning that they can either reside on individual computer systems or travel fromserver to server across the Internet to carry out different tasks.

According to Online, there is agreement among many authors in the field of artificial intelligence

that a true intelligent agent must be social, adaptable, proactive and autonomous. In the early2000s, intelligent agent technology was still evolving and a single agent with all four of these

traits had not been created. Multi-agent systems, or groups of intelligent agents in which eachexhibits one or several of the four behaviors, were in development. Nevertheless, many evolving

forms of intelligent agents existed in everything from search engines to computer help systems.

In the world of e-commerce, intelligent agents known as shopping bots are used by consumers tosearch for product and pricing information on the Web. Each shopping bot operates differently,

depending on the business model used by its operator. In one scenario, shopping bots direct usersto retailers who, by subscribing for a fee, are part of a closed system. Shopping.Yahoo and

Shop@AOL are examples of this model. Open systems are a more common arrangement andinvolve agents that include the entire Web in their searches.

Shopping bots have become very popular with consumers. In Time, International Data Corp.revealed that about 4 million shoppers took advantage of the technology in October 2000 alone.

However, they weren't popular with some companies because of their ability to initiate biddingwars and eat away profits in the process.

a digital library is a library in which collections are stored in digital formats

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