Abstract
Rapidly evolving network and computer technology, coupled with the exponential growth of the services and information available on the Internet, has already brought us to the point where hundreds of millions of people should have fast, pervasive access to a phenomenal amount of information, through desktop machines at work, school and home, through televisions, phones, pagers, and car dashboards, from anywhere and everywhere. The challenge of complex environments is therefore obvious: software is expected to do more in more situations, there are a variety of users (Power/Naive, Techie/ Financial/Clerical, ...), there are a variety of systems (Windows/NT/Mac/Unix, Client/Server, Portable, Distributed Object Manager, Web, ...), there are a variety of interactions (Real-time, Data Bases, Other Players, ...), and there are a variety of resources and goals (time, space, bandwidth, cost, security, quality, ...). To cope with such environments, the promise of information customization systems is becoming highly attractive. In this chapter we discuss important problems in relationship to such systems and smooth the way for possible solutions. The main idea is to approach information customization using a multi-agent paradigm.