The ability of agents to learn is also referred to as an intelligent ability that is very desirable to
implement in an agent system. However, we admit that even when agents do not employ learning,
they may introduce intelligent abilities into distributed computing and service support by
employing autonomy, pro-activity, reactivity and social ability.
When we talk about agents we should remember the following two views to agency:
· Individual view considers agents which do not cooperate or communicate with other agents,
· Group view (Multi-Agent Systems) considers the behavior of a collection of autonomous
agents communicating with each other in order to solve a given problem.
The first view employs autonomy, pro-activity and reactivity from the above-mentioned agent
characteristics, but it doesn't consider communication between agents as a vehicle for common
problem solving. The second view underlines social ability and cooperative/competitive behavior
between agents.
WAP- Wireless Application Protocol
The basic idea of WAP (Mann, 2000; WAP, 2000) as a standard for wireless communications is
to extend the communicative abilities of wireless telephony. In other words cellular phones are no
longer considered as just phones, but rather as communication devices capable of running
applications and capable of communicating with other devices and applications across a wireless
network. The standard takes into account the limitations of wireless data networks compared to
wired networks and the limitations of mobile handsets compared to personal computers (see
Introduction).
The WAP standard specifies an end-to-end application protocol and a browser-based application
environment as two essential elements of wireless communication. The application protocol is a
layered communication protocol that is embedded into each WAP-enabled user component. The
network side includes a server component that implements the other end of the protocol capable
of communicating with any WAP component. The server component often assumes the role of a
gateway for routing requests from a user component to an application server. The gateway can be
physically located in a telecom network, building a bridge between wireless and computer
networks.
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Agents in Mobile Commerce