NAMA: A context-aware multi-agent based web service approach to proactive need identification for personalized reminder systems

Developing a personalized, user-centric system is one of today's challenging issues in ubiquitous network-based systems, especially personalized reminder systems. Such a personalized reminder system has to identify the user's current needs dynamically and proactively based on the user's current context, such as location and current activity. However, need identification methodologies and their feasible architectures for personalized reminder systems have so far been rare. Hence, this paper aims to propose a proactive need identification mechanism by applying agent and semantic web technologies for a personalized reminder system, which is one of the supporting systems for a robust ubiquitous service support environment. We revisit associationism in order to understand a buyer's need identification process, and we adopt the process as 'purchase based on association' to implement a personalized reminder system. Based on this approach, we have shown how an agent-based semantic web service system can be used to realize a personalized reminder system which identifies a buyer's need autonomously. We have created a prototype system, NAMA (Need Aware Multi-Agent), to demonstrate the feasibility of the methodology and of the mobile settings framework that we propose in this paper. NAMA embeds a Bluetooth-based location-tracking module and identifies what users are currently looking at through their mobile devices. Based on these capabilities, NAMA considers the context, user profile with preferences, and information about currently available services to discover the user's current needs and then link the user to a set of services, which are implemented as web services.