Human-agent interaction in the light of ontology sharing and large scale cooperation

The htmlButler project aims at enhancing the human-agent interaction via the visual wrapper technology while preserving versatility. htmlButler will allow to an untrained user who has only the most basic web knowledge to visually specify simple but useful wrappers and to a more techsavvy user to visually or otherwise specify more complex wrappers. htmlButler was started 200512 and is based on visual wrapping technology research carried out in the Lixto project since 2000. What is new in htmlButler is (a) that the application is entirely server based, the user accessing it through his or her standard browser, (b) that, because of the centralized wrapper configuration and processing, the knowledge about popular wrappers can be leveraged to facilitate the specification of wrappers for new users, and (c) that users can contribute narrow and precise ontologies that help the system in recognizing potential meaning in web pages, thereby alleviating the complexity of future wrapper configurations.