ACE: Um Agente de Compras na Internet

Electronic commerce on the Internet is a growing business, but there are still some problems to overcome. Safe transactions are the most discussed issue, but other problems make shopping on the Internet difficult. When we built ACE, which stands for Specialized Shopping Agent in Portuguese, we aimed at solving one of these problems: finding the product or service that best suits someone's need. We designed a scalable model for that purpose (as this software could be used to connect every buyer and every seller on the Internet) and we built a prototype that shows how this model works. ln this paper, we describe in detail our proposed model, based on the software agents paradigm, and the methodology we used to develop it. We conclude with a comparison between ACE and a similar commercial product.