Web Navigation Support by means of Proximity-driven Assistant Agents

The explosive growth of the Web and the consequent exigency of the Web personalization domain have gained a key position in the direction of customization of the Web information to the needs of specific users, taking advantage of the knowledge acquired from the analysis of the user's navigational behavior (usage data) in correlation with other information collected in the Web context, namely, structure, content, and user profile data. This work presents an agent-based framework designed to help a user in achieving personalized navigation, by recommending related documents according to the user's responses in similar-pages searching mode. Our agent-based approach is grounded in the integration of different techniques and methodologies into a unique platform featuring user profiling, fuzzy multisets, proximity-oriented fuzzy clustering, and knowledge-based discovery technologies. Each of these methodologies serves to solve one facet of the general problem (discovering documents relevant to the user by searching the Web) and is treated by specialized agents that ultimately achieve the final functionality through cooperation and task distribution.