"ARCHIMIDES": an intelligent agent for adaptive-personalized navigation within a WEB server

With the explosive growth of Internet and the volume of information published on it, the search and retrieval of desired information has become practically impossible, if its source is not known in advance. This is the reason why search engines have been emerged, aiming to relieve the user from the "lost in hyperspace" feeling and the information overload. Imagine, however, cases where the result of some query to a search engine contains hundreds of thousands of URLs (Uniform Resource Locators). With such a number of URLs, search engines become in practice inefficient, if we consider that the navigation through even a few decades of URLs is very tiring and time consuming. Thus, instead of trying to address the information overload problem with search engines and robots (spiders), we believe that each server should facilitate itself the retrieval of desired information, published on its own domain. In this paper we present "Archimides", an intelligent agent that aims to provide intelligent, adaptive and personalized navigation within a WEB server. Provided a subset of the set of keywords that characterize the server's contents, Archimides undertakes the task to perform an intelligent information retrieval and afterwards to construct a personalized version of the server in the form of an index to pages that present some interest to the user. This index does not resemble what search engines return as a result of some query; it could be probably regarded as a much sorter version of the WEB server, with links that are dynamically inserted or deleted according to the user's interests, preferences and behavior, providing Archimides with the feature of adaptivity. As a result the user navigates in a WEB server that may completely present interest to him or her, thus relieving the user from undesired information overload.