An agent based system assists in preparing an individual for an upcoming
meeting by helping him/her retrieve relevant information about the meeting
from various sources based on preexisting information in the system. The
system obtains input text in character form indicative of the target
meeting from a calendar program that includes the time of the meeting. As
the time of the meeting approaches, the calendar program is queried to
obtain the text of the target event and that information is utilized as
input to the agent system. Then, the agent system parses the input meeting
text to extract its various components such as title, body, participants,
location, time etc. The system also performs pattern matching to identify
particular meeting fields in a meeting text. This information is utilized
to query various sources of information on the web and obtain relevant
stories about the current meeting to send back to the calendaring system.
For example, if an individual has a meeting with Netscape and Microsoft to
talk about their disputes, the system obtains this initial information
from the calendaring system. It will then parse out the text to realize
that the companies in the meeting are "Netscape" and "Microsoft" and the
topic is "disputes". It will then surf the web for relevant information
concerning the topic. Thus, in accordance with an objective of the
invention, the system updates the calendaring system and eventually the
user with the best information it can gather to prepare for the target
meeting. In accordance with a preferred embodiment, the information is
stored in a file that is obtained via selection from a link imbedded in
the calendar system.
