Intelligent Agents: Information Strategies for the Information Society.

In the workplace of today which is increasingly being overloaded with information, the concept of intelligent information agents has been widely prescribed. This paper briefly looks at the United Kingdom Government's Information Society Initiative which has been fueled by the realization that information is the key component of the ongoing information revolution. The paper then concentrates on the role of intelligent information agents in providing future generations with a superior course for flexible information working. After describing an enterprise-wide information strategy, the role of the Internet, and intelligent agents, the paper outlines requirements of intelligent information agents, which should be able to: identify other agents with which to communicate; establish a reliable communication channel with other agents; identify and be able to use a protocol for the ensuing dialogue; identify and use a common language to exchange information knowledge; know what terms within the language to use to guarantee that the other agent(s) will interpret the expressions in the same way; and know how to handle inconsistent information and the eventual mismatches that arise from different languages, views, translations and so on around all of the thousands of distributed computers in the world which are hooked up to the Internet. It then looks at the three main processes of a commercial enterprise, namely purchasing, producing and selling. (Contains 21 references.) (Author/AEF)