Introduction

This book is concerned with intelligent software agents. As with James Bond, agent 007, who, in the service of Her Majesty, the Queen of Great Britain, solves difficult problems by himself and never loses sight of the task at hand, intelligent software agents help private and business users in their search for information and performance of tasks in a networked, digital world. The Internet today provides us with an introductory view of how this digital and networked world will look. Intelligent agents in future will develop into an important tool for private and business users. Many experts believe they provide a new category of software that will gain greatly in importance in the coming years.