HyperNews, a hypermedia electronic-newspaper environment based on agents

The HyperNews project aims at developing a hypermedia electronic newspaper system, based on agent technology, that is intended to help readers to reduce the time spent on searching for relevant information and to enable information providers to commercialize hypermedia electronic news articles in terms similar to those of printed newspapers. The system enforces copyright control and payment on a "pay per use" basis. Moreover, HyperNews establishes intraand cross-newspaper hyperlinks according to the interests of the reader and presents the information consumer with a personalized hypermedia electronic newspaper through a Java-based World Wide Web browser. The information consumers and providers run an agent execution platform on which the different components of the HyperNews system execute as software agents. The mobile agents are used to encapsulate the data in HyperNews article agents and to update specific software agents that are bound to the information providers. The resulting article agents can be distributed and duplicated at will, since access to the content is bound to the payment.