Abstract

The Impulse research project at the MIT Media Lab, which captures our vision of the future of commerce, attempts to augment the rich sensory experience of the tangible world with the informational abundance, speed, and low search costs of the Internet. In this paper, we present the design and implementation schema of a subset of the Impulse vision that addresses the problem of location-specific resource brokering. We discuss how two projects being conducted within the group, Multi-Attribute Resource Intermediary (MARI) and Wherehoo, can be combined to exploit the functionality afforded by a brokering architecture in a geographically constrained context. In particular, we examine the specific example of offering location-sensitive restaurant recommendations to mobile individuals.

Author Keywords: Electronic commerce; Location-sensitive brokering; Software agents; Intermediaries; Product brokering; Merchant brokering; Negotiation; Utility theory; Electronic markets

Article Outline

1. Introduction

2. Related work

3. MARI and Wherehoo

3.1. MARI: Multi-Attribute Resource Intermediary

3.2. Wherehoo

3.3. Functional overview and application domain

4. Implementation

4.1. Usage scenario and operational schema

4.1.1. Capturing user preferences

4.1.2. Delineating transaction partners

4.2. Technical implementation

5. Limitations, problems encountered, and future work

6. Conclusion

References

Vitae