Customisable Personal Agent

Deadline: 27/4/2006 at 12:00

Total marks: 60

This exercise should be carried out individually. The aim of this exercise is to build a customisable personal agent that produces a web page including module related information of interest retrieved from the CIT web site. The agent is constructed in a number of incremental stages, each of which introduces more information and additional customisation opportunities. There are overall five stages, which need to be carried out in order. Note that only stage five provides you with alternative paths to follow, i.e. you can carry 5a and 5b in either order. You need to demonstrate your agent working in the lab on the day of the deadline. Details about the time and place for the demonstration will follow.

Stage 1 – 10 marks

According to the CIT web site, degree modules are classified into a number of categories (Orientation, Intermediate, Advanced I, Advanced II and MSc). In this stage the agent produces a web page listing the modules belonging to the categories of interest to the user. The information included in the web page is extracted from the main CIT web page (www.gsi.strath.ac.uk/gsi/cit/). The user specifies its interests by either providing the names of the categories he/she wants (see above) or “All” in the case where all the categories are of interest. The produced web page clearly indicates the names of the modules and the category they belong to.

Stage 2 – 10 marks

In the CIT web site, a number of the modules have accompanying Module Descriptor pages. In this stage the agent of stage 1 is extended to produce a web page listing for the modules of interest to the user, the name of the module, the category it belongs to (see stage1), the name(s) of the provider(s), the number of credits, and the nominal contact hours. This information is extracted from the Module Descriptor web page. The URL of the module descriptor web page is retrieved from the main CIT web page. In cases where such page is not available, the produced web page indicates that “No Module Descriptor” was found. The user specifies the modules of interest in two steps. First, he/she selects the categories of interest (see stage 1) to which the agent responds with a list of modules for the selected categories. Second, from the list of modules provided in the first step, the user identifies the ones of interest. In other words, the first step is the same as stage 1 with the difference that instead of producing a web page the output is provided on screen to allow the user to carry out the second step.

Stage 3 – 10 marks

The Module Descriptor web pages contain also additional information, quite often under sections titled Aims, Main Topics, Assessment and Indicative Texts. However, some pages organise the content under different section headings. In this stage the agent of stage 2 is extended to include additional information in the produced web page. The additional information includes the content of the sections of interest to the user. This information is again extracted from the module descriptor web pages with a clear indication provided when such a page could not be found, or when section headings could not be identified. In this stage in addition to the two steps of stage 2 we introduce a third step for the user to specify which sections he/she is interested in. In this step, for each of the modules selected in the previous step (see stage 2) the agent presents to the user a list of identified section headings, and the user selects the ones of interest.

Stage 4 – 10 marks

A number of the modules also have additional Teaching Material web pages produced by their providers. In this stage the agent of stage 3 is extended to indicate in the produced web page for each module of interest whether or not there is a teaching material web page and when was this page last modified. Note that the agent should really check whether the page is there and not just rely on the presence of a web link in the module descriptor page.

Stage 5a – 10 marks

In this stage the agent of stage 4 is enhanced by providing a graphical user interface to support its customisation by the user.

Stage 5b – 10 marks

This stage allows you to further enhance your agent by incorporating as much as possible of the Best Practice in agent development (see relevant chapter).