B2B Integration : A Practical Guide to Collaborative E-commerce

394 B2B Integration — A Practical Guide to Collaborative E-commerce
13.9.1. Information gathering and filtering
In 1982, the volume of publicly available scientific, corporate and
technical information had doubled every five years. By 1988, it had
doubled every 2.2 years and by 1992 every 1.6 years. Due to the
Internet, the amount of information available electronically has increased
by manifolds and is now doubling in less than a year. According to
IBM, over 67,000 corporations are publishing new Websites every day.
This information overload is causing major problems, as far as
gathering relevant information and network bandwidth are concerned.
Information gathering and filtering agents help in overcoming these
problems, as they affect B2B e-commerce and companies that participate
in it, as follows:
• Companies usually publish data such as catalogs in formats and
structures that are vastly varied and this information is very dynamic.
This information should be made available to all buyers just-in-time
(JIT) — delivered immediately as needed, relevant — based on users'
preferences and filters and auto-refreshed — updated whenever a new
piece of information arrives. Agents can be used to locate information
sources, to combine intelligently disparate streams of information
from multiple distributed resources to respond to a specific request
from users with relevant, synthesized results. Agents can help by
managing data and information sources, such as routing e-mails,
information retrieval, building dynamic catalogs and retrieving latest
product information. In short, they are able to anticipate and act on
users' information needs.
• Companies face the challenge of organizing network flows in a way
that prevents massive retrieval of information from remote sources.
The inundation of data can cause severe degradation of their network
performance. Software agents help in providing a solution to this
problem. Agents can gather and select this information locally, thereby
avoiding unnecessary network loads.
• Agents are not only able to perform searches based on keywords,
but also based on context. They will deduce this context from user
information (i.e., a built-up user model) or by using other services,