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BotSpot® Monthly Newsletter BotSpot® Monthly Newsletter June 15, 1998 V1N5 Greetings! Welcome to Volume 1 Number 5 of the BotSpot® Monthly Newsletter discussing happenings about Bots and Intelligent Agents on the World Wide Web and Internet. You are receiving this as a subscriber to this newsletter and we welcome you to the BotSpot® family! Additional information about this monthly newsletter and BotSpot's bi-weekly report is available at /newsletter/. Please feel free to communicate with us at anytime concerning our publications and site and more specifically what you would like to see in this newsletter. The field of bots and intelligent agents is expanding at a record pace and our goal is to keep you updated with the latest happenings at BotSpot® as well as throughout the entire field. This newsletter will be emailed to you on the 15th of each month. If the 15th falls on a Saturday or Sunday then the newsletter will be emailed to you on Monday morning. Should you have any questions concerning your subscription feel free to email us at anytime! BotSpot® is proud to announce that we have just received our 1,800th subscriber to our BotSpot® Monthly Newsletter and we are continuing to grow at a excellent rate with additional subscribers being added daily. As a reward to our new and current subscribes we are reformatting the New Bots that we have recently classified in our database and listing them below complete with active URLs. This information is taken from our previous BotSpot® Report and we are pleased to give you this information as our way to say "thank you" and with our sincere compliments! Also as you can see the content of BotSpot® is growing exponentially and in the last month we have doubled! BotSpot® is mentioned in the June 15, 1998 Issue of Wired Magazine with a link to our Best of the Bots review of ALICE and Eliza! The latest sampling of New Bots and Intelligent Agents from The BotSpot® Report for the last month are as follows. This Report gives complete description and hypertext link to the resource. An example of the fee based BotSpot® Report is available here. These will be placed in our public BotSpot® Classification Search Database within 30 days. New Bots Samples http://www.engr.sc.edu/research/CIT/demos/java/joe/ Java Ontology Editor Java Ontology Editor (JOE) is an applet that reads an URL with ontology stored in KIF format and generates various graphical representations of the ontology. http://www.aeneid.com/products.html Internet Research Assistant Internet Research Assistant (IRA) is the initial offering in a product family that enables people who rely on competitive information to easily find and manage what is they need to know. IRA packages information so it can be analyzed and shared, thus becoming part of a corporation's intelligence. By focusing on external competitive information, IRA represents the next generation of knowledge management solutions. http://www.labs.bt.com/projects/index.htm Jasper System The Jasper System is a system of intelligent software agents which hold details of the interests of their users in the form of user profiles. Jasper has the capability to summarize and extract key words from WWW pages and share the information with users whose profiles indicate similar interests. http://www.crystaliz.com/research/era.htm ERA Project The Environment for Reflective Agents (ERA) Project is based on three important insights. The first is the need to provide automation support to users that is easy to use as a spreadsheet marco language or a visual programming language. The second is the recognition that end user automation tasks may span from simple scripts to applications that may embody sophisticated control such as trading, mediating, and other types of tasks. Finally, the third insight is that the topology of the distributed automation that users may want to deploy spans systems that are not under user's administrative control. http://www.think.com/html/products/products.htm Darwin Darwin is a suite of software tools that analyze large collections of data to discover new patterns and forecast future trends. This process of sifting through enormous databases to extract hidden information is called "data mining". Darwin is an intelligent data mining application. http://www.businessbots.com/ BusinessBots BusinessBots creates advanced electronic commerce services and applications for systems involving multiple, interacting software agents. Founded by legendary computer game designer Moses Ma, BusinessBots has attracted top scientists in game-theory and mathematics, risk management and human interface design. The company holds key patents in the optimization of automated negotiations and business processes in multiagent systems. BusinessBots and CommerceNet were recently awarded a 5 million dollar National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Advanced Technology grant, to design and deploy a revolutionary infrastructure for object-oriented electronic commerce, which is called "Component Commerce". http://www.sics.se/isl/diglib/ Agent Based Digital Library Infrastructure Project The aim of this SICS Intelligent System Laboratory project is to create a Virtual Community Library (VCL) where each user has a personal library and, at the same time, is part of a larger community consisting of other users' personal libraries and, through intermediators, other digital libraries. In the architecture a digital library is seen as a decentralized collection of interacting self-interested agents where an agent represents the knowledge and interests of an individual user. Each agent is perceived as a personal digital library serving one individual user (or other information source). http://www.sics.se/isl/ Intelligent Systems Laboratory The Intelligent Systems Laboratory (ISL) of the Swedish Institute of Computer Science (SICS) investigates and develops methods, tools, and technology for the design and implementation of complex problem solving and adaptive software systems. Applications areas include electronic commerce, command and control, personal communication systems, workflow management, network management, distributed multimedia information systems and product configurations. The five main research areas are Agent Based Systems, Combinatorial Problem Solving and SICStus Prolog, Programming Technology for Networked and Mobile Computing, Knowledge Engineering for Configuration Problems and Personal Information Systems. http://www.cetus-links.org/oo_mobile_agents.html Mobile Agents A extremely comprehensive metasite on Mobile Agents which are autonomous, intelligent programs that move through a network, searching for and interacting with services on the user's behalf. These systems use specialized servers to interpret the agent's behavior and communicate with other servers. A Mobile Agent has inherent navigational autonomy and can ask to be sent to some other nodes. http://members.home.net:80/marcush/IRS/Jam/Jam-man.html Jam! Agents Jam! is an intelligent agent architecture that grew out of academic research and extended during the last five years of use, development, and application. Jam combines the best aspects of several leading-edge intelligent agent frameworks, including the Procedural Reasoning System (PRS) of Georgeff, Lansky, Rao. et.al., the University of Michigan's implementation of PRS called UMPRS, and SRI International's ACT plan interlingua, and the Structured Circuit Semantics (SCS) representation of Lee and Durfee. http://members.home.net:80/marcush/IRS/Umprs/umprs-man.html UM-PRS UM-PRS (University of Michigan's implementation of the Procedural Reasoning System) is composed of four components: a database representing the current world model, a library of plans called Knowledge Areas (KAs), a primitive function library and primitive function interface for performing low-level functions, and an intention structure that maintains the runtime state of the set of currently active goals. http://www.cs.vu.nl/vakgroepen/ai/projects/desire/ DESIRE Research Programme The DESIRE research programme focuses on the study of compositional multi-agent systems for complex (and often distributed) tasks and development methods for these systems. In this research programme the agent metaphor has been adopted as a point of departure: a complex task can be modeled as a composition of a number of tasks, each of which is performed by one or more agents, these agents can have the form of automated systems or human agents (users). http://www.whispers.com/ Personal Notification Service Personal Notification Service by Whispers utilizes Whispers unique language and platform for software agents, push technology and the Internet. Services include a reminder service, job search, home search, email filter, order entry and more. Whispers Language may be found under the Language and Code in BotSpot's FAQs. http://www.cyberalert.com CyberAlert CyberAlert - Internet monitoring and alert service for market intelligence. CyberAlert(tm) is an online radar and market intelligence system to monitor the Internet - seeking out, tracking and managing information put on the Internet about your company and its products by others. The CyberAlert Internet monitoring system delivers daily alerts that list and hot link all new "clips" found in Web sites, News Groups, and ListServ Discussion Groups that refer to your company or its products, services, brands, and trademarks. http://softwaresolutions.net/whostalking/ Who's Talking The corporate Intelligence Agent for Windows 95. Trademark and Copyright Protection, Competitive Research from your Personal Intelligence Agent. Scour the Internet with Who's Talking. http://www.ecatch.com/index.htm eCatch This French offline navigator allows previous day searches (bookmarks) of web sites, manages addresses, search engines, and latest updates to pages and other significant points. http://www.nearsite.com/ NearSite NearSite delivers faster web browsing online and offline, Web recording like a VCR for your browser, Channels your favorite web sites updated and pushed to your desktop, Archives a permanent store of your top sites, Autobrowsing automated high speed surfing, and works with your favorite browser. http://www.tierra.com/ Tierra Highlights2 Tierra Highlights2 is the one tool you need to turn your browser into a powerful efficient information-gathering system. Highlights2 lets you monitor the information sources you choose, retrieves changed pages to your hard drive for rapid display, lets you know discreetly that a page has changed and when you view the changed page the new information which fits your profile gets highlighted so you can focus on it quickly. http://www.ics.uci.edu/CORPS/dica.html Do-I-Care Agent The Do-I-Care Agent (DICA) provides a solution to the resource re-discovery problem on the Web. There is no easy way, once you've found an interesting site, to know when new and interesting material will show up. For example, you may want to know about a new and interesting paper by a colleague. Or you may want to know about airplane ticket sales. You don't want to know about minor changes - you want to know when an airfare sale occurs. DICA solves this problem. It does so by periodically visiting the site - but it lets the user know only when something interesting has occurred. It does this through a machine learning engine, which the user can train to know what is interesting to her. http://www.smart-spider.com/ Smart Spider Smart Spider offers a full family of Internet Spiders and Bots including FetchRover, UrlChecker, SiteCopier, Keyword Search Engines and Full-Text Search Engines. Dozens of user-settable options allow the products to solve unique problems. Custom extensions are available as well. http://www.alma.com/excfeat/ Excerpt Search Engine Excerpt(tm) Search Engine for Web sites is loaded with many features not found in many search engines. Proximity queries, context words, wildcard patterns anywhere, date and time sort and search, score by relevance and standard Boolean operators. http://www.pls.com/ Personal Agent Personal Agent, a PLS Product, allows remote WWW users to submit persistent "intelligent queries" called agents. These agents periodically search full-text databases built from dynamic data - such as newsfeeds or posted text - and automatically emails the user when the information has been updated. Other products include PLWeb Turbo, EZ Admin, PLSync, PLWeb-CD, Callable Personal Librarian (CPL), Personal Librarian (PL) and Illustra DataBlade. http://www.chimerasoft.com/chimerasoft/netreaper/ NetReaper NetReaper is an easy to use tool for gathering information from the World Wide Web, extracting just the interesting pieces of it, and storing them to a file or to a database. NetReaper can also scan and extract data from local files on your computer. If you can think of information available on the Internet that is useful to you, chances are NetReaper can help you get at it in a useful format. http://www.jwsg.com/wm10jwsg.exe Word Market Word Market - Track whats hot on the Internet. This program monitors the searches that are performed on the WebCrawler, MetaCrawler and Magellan search engines and summarizes the results. View in real-time what people are searching for and find out which search words are new, how many times a search was requested. Options include saving the most popular searches and saving the current days new searches. http://www.jwsg.com/gr10jwsg.exe GIF Runner GIF Runner locates targeted animated GIFs on the Internet. An example would be to find animated pictures of dogs...just enter the word dog and click start. GIF Runner will find and display animated pictures of dogs in a very efficient manner. Online help and file saving options are included. This utility requires Internet Explorer 4.0 or greater. http://208.234.18.163/programs/Top10Tracker.exe Top-10 Tracker Top-10 Tracker will run separate queries on each of the top search engines and will return the results in a easy to read and understand report. http://www.citizen1.com/ Citeline Citeline is the first Internet research software designed specifically for pharmaceutical and health technology professionals. Citeline Professional systematically identifies and organizes Web sites of most value to healthcare industry professionals, providing access to more than 90 million pages ordinarily invisible to traditional search engines. Its Site Monitor function provides ongoing, automatic retrieval of new results from the Internet, and its Confidential Search capability protects the company's interests. http://www.umap.com/english/index.htm Umap Forget overwhelming lists of thousands of documents, when you are merely asking for a simple answer. With its dynamic map, Umap allows you to have an instant overview of all the answers at a glance. The dynamic map enables you to quickly remove all the answers irrelevant to your request in a few clicks and get to the ten interesting pages you are really asking for in five minutes. Ideal complement for both search engines and bots and agents. Umap is your instrument for exploration and exploitation of worlds of information through visualization. http://mesa.rrzn.uni-hannover.de/ MESA MESA - A Meta-Email-Search Agent. For a given name (last name is required, first name is optional) it searches in parallel at nearly all available sources of email addresses on the Internet. However, be always aware that there is NO complete directory of all email addresses. So if you can not find the address here, it might nevertheless exist. http://www.sharpeware.com/html/webstorm.html WebStorm You determine what sets of search sites to use and what keywords you are interested in finding. WebStorm take cares of finding the links you need, checking their performance and age and managing their browsing. No need to wait for slow-loading search sites packed with advertising graphics --- cut straight to the results you want with everything controlled from one simple toolbar. http://www.lub.lu.se/combine/ Combine Combine is an open system for harvesting and threshing (indexing) Internet resources. The name is derived from the combine-harvester since they perform their jobs in similar way. A User's Guide giving a basic description of the design of Combine and instructions on how to setup and run along with a more technical guide for those who want to know more about the internal design of Combine - are available at this site. http://www.sics.se/~market/ Agent-Based Market Space Agent-Based Market Space - Agent Mediated Electronic Commerce. The vision is to enable automation of electronic commerce, focused on the interaction in a market (like searching, negotiation, deal settlement) using agents. Each participant in the market (whichever role he/she has) have an agent that automate the interactions partially or fully. The site offers an overview of the AMP (Agent-Based Marketplace Project), Models, Documents, Agent Toolkit and Electronic Commerce/Agents Links. http://ecommerce.media.mit.edu/ The AmEC Initiative The Agent-mediated Electronic Commerce (AmEC) Initiative investigates how software agent technologies can expedite the electronic commerce revolution. Issues addressed include distributed component-based marketplaces, open and extensible languages and protocols for locating and defining goods and services, merchant differentiation, value-based product comparisons, buying decision aids, negotiation protocols, visualization of marketplace data and activities, and issues of trust, reputation, security, marketing, intermediaries, as well as the socioeconomic implications of next generation agent-mediated electronic commerce systems. BotSpot's Best and Weekly Awards  May 18, 1998 URL: http://www.tetranetsoftware.com/products/wisebot.htm Name: Wisebot Developer: Tetranet Software Incorporated Classification: KnowledgeBot Classification Direct Internet Access: http://www.knowledgebots.com Wisebot is a new Web development tool that automatically creates and maintains a navigation system for your site. The navigation system consists of interactive applets that will: 1) Make your site easier to Navigate, 2) Help visitors locate information and knowledge on your site and 3) Keep visitors informed about updates to your site. May 25, 1998 URL: http://google.stanford.edu/ Name: Google Search Developer: Stanford University Classification: SearchBot Classification Direct Internet Access: http://www.searchbots.com The Google Search Engine employs a concept of Page Rank which is a recursive notion of importance or quality, not a simple popularity count of off site citations. The idea is that a page's importance is defined as roughly the sum of the importance of pages that point to it. That way, even if a page only has one link from the Yahoo home page, it is still very important. And conversely, if a page has a large number of unimportant links, it is not important. While this sounds recursive, it turns out there are several ways to compute this steady state distribution. PageRank is an important and effective way to order search results and prevent spamming or misleading search engines. Another interpretation of PageRank is that of a usage simulation (where users click randomly on links) or a way of computing a collaborative notion of trust. June 1, 1998 URL: http://www.sharpeware.com/html/webstorm.html Name: WebStorm Developer: SharpeWare Classification: SearchBot Classification Direct Internet Access: http://www.searchbots.com You determine what sets of search sites to use and what keywords you are interested in finding. WebStorm take cares of finding the links you need, checking their performance and age and managing their browsing. No need to wait for slow-loading search sites packed with advertising graphics --- cut straight to the results you want with everything controlled from one simple toolbar. June 8, 1998 URL: http://www.businessbots.com/ Name: BusinessBots Developer: BusinessBots, Inc. Classification: KnowledgeBot Classification Direct Internet Access: http://www.knowledgebots.com BusinessBots creates advanced electronic commerce services and applications for systems involving multiple, interacting software agents. Founded by legendary computer game designer Moses Ma, BusinessBots has attracted top scientists in game-theory and mathematics, risk management and human interface design. The company holds key patents in the optimization of automated negotiations and business processes in multiagent systems. BusinessBots and CommerceNet were recently awarded a 5 million dollar National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Advanced Technology grant, to design and deploy a revolutionary infrastructure for object-oriented electronic commerce, which is called "Component Commerce". Visit our Best of the Bots reviews and employ your bot and intelligent agent today! A complete archive of all the BotSpot® of the Week awardees is available for 1996, 1997 and 1998 Happenings and Updates The FAQs section of BotSpot® has been the happening place last month! Check out FAQs and Libraries within the section and you will find over 10 new listings! Visit Articles and Papers and you will discover new articles from Information Gathering Agents to Google and the WebBase. Scroll down to Conferences and visit 17 new and recently posted intelligent agent workshops and conferences all over the world. Also we have created a new listing within Conferences that shows the conferences by date as well as alphabetical. Five new listings just placed upon Electronic Journals, Magazines and Newsletters and check out Language and Code and the new bot and intelligent agents scripts! Information Bots, FAQ Bots and Utility Bots are becoming quite well known on the Internet these days. Team BotSpot® has decided to create a database for these bots and intelligent agents on the Internet using a direct access approach. Over the next many months we will be classifying, analyzing and prioritizing information bots, faq bots and utility bots and placing them in one of the above described databases. If you know of an information bot, faq bot or utility bot please let us know so we may contact them to be classified. We will also be seeking sponsors as well. The above bots will be accessible direct at the following URLs: Information Bots FAQ Bots Utility Bots Questions about BotSpot®'s metasite? Play a 30 minute video describing BotSpot by its Founder and CEO by clicking here. Remember to use our intuitive Bot Classification Database available on BotSpot® by clicking on Search or just type the following URLs to go direct.... http://www.academicbots.com http://www.botdesign.com http://www.chatter-bots.com http://www.commercebots.com http://www.funbots.com http://www.governmentbots.com http://www.knowledgebots.com http://www.miscellaneousbots.com http://www.newsbots.com http://www.searchbots.com http://www.shoppingbots.com http://www.softwarebots.com http://www.stockbots.com http://www.updatebots.com You will find a complete listing of Bots, Intelligent Agents and related information under each classification. For a brief explanation of what each classification includes, refer to the Bot Description page. The following is an abbreviated posting that Team BotSpot® sends to fellow Internauts all over the Internet who have requested information about BotSpot and the Team would greatly appreciate Newsletter subscribers sending this to interested people describing BotSpot. Just cut and paste :-) Visit BotSpot® and chat with Eliza...the original ChatterBot! Visit BotSpot® and chat with Shallow Red...A Bot for the Year 2000! BotSpot® - The Spot for all Bots and Intelligent Agents on the Net including 14 searchable Bot Classification Databases, FAQs, Libraries, Articles, Newsletters, Electronic Journals, Listservs, Conferences, Previous Conferences Proceedings, Language and Code, Book Store, New Bots, Add a Bot, NewsBots, CommerceBots, ShoppingBots, KnowledgeBots, Search Bots, Intelligent Agents, Artificial Intelligence and more. Visit the BotSpot® of the Week awarded by Team BotSpot. Read "Best of the Bots" reviews and "The Secret Agent Man" column by Don Barker. BotSpot® has received over 210 awards in its first eighteen months including the "NetGuide Platinum Award", the "USA Today HotSite", the "Scout Report Selection", "Snap! Best of the Web Winner", NetGuide's "Top 10 Internet Sites", PC Magazine's "Top 100 Best Web Sites" and PC Review's "Best Internet Web Sites of 1997" and is lauded as the definitive resource for bots, intelligent agents and artificial intelligence on the Net. Subscribe to BotSpot's free monthly BotSpot® Newsletter or stay completely attuned by subscribing to the BotSpot® Report every two weeks on the latest happenings, new bots/intelligent agents and industry updates. BotSpot® will make an excellent bookmark and link for you and/or your site! View a thirty minute video review of BotSpot® available at the top of BotSpot's home page! Team BotSpot® BotSpot® Monthly Newsletter V1N5 June 15, 1998  
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