The Igentia project is based on a specific technology using:

• A generalized methodology to manage, design and use web agents by using agents models or agents types. Each agent has a specific behavior depending on its skills. But all of them share the same structure. The methodology presented here is mainly dedicated to designing new agents using the skills available. With it, one can create new instances of existing agents as well.
• A specific methology on information sources localisation.
• A set of metasearch engines.
• A specific tool, using simple expressions, to teach the agents and robots the way to find relevant information sources.
• An Internet information sources specific knowledge.

Agents Types or Skills By now Igentia has different types of agents available to you. This means that when you design your personal agent, you will have to choose first the agent type whose know-how or craft or skill is the most appropriate to handle your information needs. Each agent type has its own way to manage the data available on the Internet. Here are some examples of our Agents Skills : K-News: This skill is the most widely used. With K-News the agent crawls the Internet and notifies the subscriber when new information in his field of interest occurs. Value-Survey: With this skill, the agent probes web pages and notifies the subscriber (or another agent for further treatment) when some values in them have moved away from a predefined threshold. Positions: With this one, the agent analyzes the popularity of a site against its competitors in a specific field and delivers statistics on popularity logs (to check its evolution) and on a few keywords. Rumors-Survey: An agent with this skill is an extremely valuable tool to help you anticipate the disasters, consequences of rumors. Being the first to know a rumor or hoax starts to propagate about your company, you have the time to invent appropriate counter measures before it's too late. Company-Survey: This skill lets you scrutinize a given list of company names.

Expressions needed to collect Information Sources Don't be scared! It's much easier than it could look like. To create the expressions required to transfer your expertise to your agent, you'll have access to a toolbox very straightforward to use. With this toolbox you'll teach your agents where are the information sources. You can provide direct information or indirect ways to get to it. The direct way is to provide the agents with URLs you know to be relevant. Indirect ways are done by the means of Search Engines, or local or distant bookmarks, or directory pages on the web. Our specific syntax allows you to explain easily to the agent how to find the information using different search engines or directories. In practice, with three words of this syntax you will achieve the managing of 50 or more URLs! Using this syntax will explain this great feature where ten pages of documentation would fail. Once you acquire this practice you'll never think to search something on the web anymore, but you'll think over only to the best ways to locate the information. With a bit of practice, you'll understand the Igentia backbone methodology that helps to find Internet information. With Igentia you never look for something, you look for the way to find it. And when you find it, you just have to explain it to an agent and let it do the work for you.