A Web infrastructure for people and agent interaction and collaboration

Internet pervasive services call for flexible supports to enable a wide degree of collaboration. On the one hand, many people are connected to the Internet and surf the Web not only to retrieve information, but also to carry out several kinds of different tasks via online services. On the other hand, the Internet is likely soon to be populated by software agents that will act on behalf of users, and that are "intelligent" enough to achieve better results without boring their users. In this paper, we present a Web-based modular architecture that permits interaction and collaboration among people and agents, leading to a more fruitful exploitation of the capabilities offered by the Internet. A negotiation application based on auctions is used to show the advantages of the proposed architecture.