Software Support

If this project is going to discover and document religion on the Internet it will be necessary to have some help from software to sort out what is religion and what has no relationship to religion. There are a number of words being related to software that might help with this task. They include "Bots," "Agents," and "Data Mining."

In April 1996 Wired Magazine provided a definition of a Bot: http://www.conceptone.com/netnews/nn1202.htm

A page that links to many bots is: http://www.botspot.com/main.html

Professor Thomas W. Malone
http://ccs.mit.edu/Tom.html
Email MALONE@MIT.EDU

Thomas W. Malone is the Patrick J. McGovern Professor of Information Systems at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He is also the founder and director of the MIT Center for Coordination Science. This new research center (and Professor Malone's own research) focuses on (1) how computer and communications technology can help people work together in groups and organizations, and (2) how organizations can be designed to take advantage of the new capabilities provided by information technology. Among other things, Professor Malone is well-known for having led the team at MIT that developed the Information Lens system, a pioneering groupware tool in which intelligent agents help users find, filter, and sort large volumes of electronic information. He also predicted, long before these things became widely believed, that information technology would lead to more electronic buying and selling, to more "outsourcing" of non-core functions in a firm, and to smaller firms.

If anyone reading this has experience with the Information Lens System or knowledge about its possible use related to this project, please send me an e-mail message at kbedell@dnaco.net

The MIT Media Lab has a section on Software Agents. The following references were taken from that page.

Title: MetaCrawler Search Softbot URL: http://www.cs.washington.edu/research/projects/ai/metacrawler/www/

Description: Etzioni's work at U of Washington. Parasitic operation, uses single user querie and accesses eight other search engines, collects and validates results, presents them to the user. Submitter: moux@media.mit.edu

Sheth, 1994 Sheth, Beerud. Adaptive Agents for Information Processing. SM Thesis. MIT. Cambridge, MA. 1994. This was a project that included producing software to sort and select data from newsgroups. It might be very helpful.

This article is about how to deal with all the information that is available on the Internat. Waldrop, 1990 Waldrop, M. Mitchell. Learning to drink from a fire hose. Science, v248, pg 674. 1990.

The University Maryland has a Web Page where they describe various agent softwares.
http://www.cs.umbc.edu/agents/web/

Offline browsers may be a good way to search for information and then distill it.
TechWeb has a page on off-line web browsing agents. Beyond Browsing--Offline Web Agents by Joel T. Patz. "Tired of waiting for web pages to download? Offline web agents are designed to log on, get the information you need, and log off while you are performing other tasks. They come in a variety of flavors, but the most popular are designed to log onto a web site, roam through a user-definable set of levels (that is, you control how many levels