8. Conclusion

In this paper we have described a general framework for building information assistants and presented two compelling applications of this framework. The combination of real-time, structured access to Web sources and hierarchical constraint propagation provides a powerful paradigm for building new web-based information assistants. Both example applications that we presented go beyond what is currently available on the Web. And we believe there is a wide variety of other interesting information assistants that can be built using the same framework. Other possible assistants include a real estate assistant for locating and buying a house and a financial planning assistant for planning investments, major purchases and retirement.

There are many interesting research problems associated with building information assistants. We are currently extending the underlying constraint reasoning system to provide support for temporal constraints and resources. We are also investigating a variety of integration issues that arise, including efficient distributed spatial data integration. We are building a new version of the graphical user interface that runs in a browser, but still provides the real-time update of the information. Finally, we are exploring the addition of monitoring agents for tracking plans once they have been created, such as an agent for tracking flight schedules for cancellations or flight delays.