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above, we hope to develop a way to feed this information back into the ranking
and selection of stories by the tour guide agent.
An annotation-sensitive tour guide
Doyle has arrived at this problem from a different direction. Given the growing
size and popularity of the Internet, his concern has been to find mechanisms
that enable interface agents of varying degrees of sophistication to act intel-
ligently and believably across a wide array of sites. His approach has been to
add
annotations
to these sites. Annotations are declarations and procedures
embedded in the environment and made accessible to wandering agents. They
provide useful information about available content and activities, as well as
assisting agents in the choice and timing of their actions on these sites.
Previous explorations have taken place in text-based environments called
MUDs, where agents have used annotations to solve puzzles, play games, and
enhance their emotional intelligence with respect to the environment (Doyle
& Hayes-Roth 1998a, b). While the World Wide Web does not offer as so-
phisticated or flexible a platform for agent behavior, its ubiquity and obvi-
ous amenability to simple forms of annotation make it a natural choice for
exploring this approach.
Web sites are organized collections of documents, but frequently the or-
ganization is opaque to the visitor. Usually this is because Web browsers have
no good affordances for revealing complex structure of sites. We have not yet
gone beyond the metaphors of the desktop or the card stack. The introduction
of a character, however, provides the designer with another kind of interface
to the user, one that can construct a narrative presentation that may be more
natural and easy to comprehend. If people understand the world in terms of
stories, our tendency will be to create or associate stories with the text and im-
ages we encounter as we navigate the site. This suggests that the site's designer
may be able to communicate more effectively by actively offering narratives to
site visitors, rather than requiring them to create their own.
Doyle's work on annotations for enabling agents and enhancing sites
seemed a natural mechanism for exploring this idea. By embedding details of
the site's content as well as actual stories on the site in a form that the agents
can make use of, we can produce an adaptive guide that has both knowledge of
the user and an understanding of the site. This guide can entertain or edify ac-
cording to the user's interests while at the same time furthering the annotation
designer's goals for the site.
