Recent years have seen a dramatic increase in the development of agent technology. Agent systems have been applied to many areas, but undoubtedly the most widely publicised application area has been the Internet. The size of the Internet and the subsequent large volume of information has spawned agents which can search, filter, recommend and present information to a user. Many such agent
... [Show full abstract] applications can be customised to the preferences of the user. Indeed, most go further in including a profile of the user which is used to guide the operation of the agent. But what is a user profile? The purpose of this paper is to review the personalisation of agent technology, and to consider what implications arise for future personal agent applications. Following the review of a number of existing agent applications with user profiling abilities, we discuss the Open Profiling Standard as the first attempt to describe the content and widespread use of user profile information. We then identify four...