A Web agent for automating e-commerce operations

Abstract

The great amount of information that a user handles in their typical transactions on the Internet - identifiers, addresses, credit card numbers, among others - makes it necessary to have a mechanism which facilitates the secure management of that information, and its use in a convenient way on a daily basis. The main goal is to favor the B2C - Business to Consumer -e-commerce activity by creating a friendly and secure environment. This paper introduces an Internet navigation assistant, implemented as a generic, extensible and dynamically-updatable personal agent. This agent is included into a distributed architecture which is composed by a set of secure Web servers and on the client side, one agent per user machine, developed as a Microsoft Internet Explorer toolbar. The agent includes, among others services, an automatic-filler which learns from users' activity, and secure payments services, like a virtual-card generator or an Europay's SPA/UCAF wallet.