SSP Group Meeting
Wednesday, June 3rd, 11am-12pm
Department of Artificial Intelligence, 80 South Bridge, Room F10


 

How Knowledge of the Synthesis of Web Sites Can Make them More Accessible

Dave Robertson

The more information is expressed in conventional Worldwide Web sites the more difficult to it is to find appropriate information. One of the uses proposed for autonomous software "agents" is to look around for appropriate information; bring it back; or perhaps make use of it directly in some way. It is very difficult to think how this can be done reliably, in general, if the information is expressed as (essentially) running text. One solution to this problem is to represent the underlying "logical structure" of the information to be shared between sites, but it is easy to think of cases where this solution is impractical. We shall discuss a different (but related) solution which involves constrained generation of sites from problem descriptions and use of the additional design rationale to assist "agents" in accessing them.