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Chapter 1
Introduction
1.1
Introduction
Cyberspace was first presented in William Gibson's classic book Neuromancer
in 1984. We choose to interpret cyberspace as being all systems, services and
underlying infrastructure known as the Internet. This view is shared in the dic-
tionary WordNet which considers cyberspace and the Internet to be synonymous
(Miller [1995]).
Figure 1.1: William Gibson's Neuromancer
This thesis is titled Customizing Cyberspace because it describes approaches for
user representation and user prediction that can be used for the customization of
cyberspace services to individual users. Such customization is frequently called
personalization. Personalization of computer-based services is often studied in
the fields of marketing and human-computer interaction, but we choose to take
a (distributed) artificial intelligence approach with software agents and classifi-
cation due to scope of the Electronic Commercial Agents (ElComAg) project.

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