Resumen
The article introduces a special section based on a straightforward vision of the Internet evolution, in the March 1, 1999 issue of the journal Communications. This evolution will be based on all sorts of new and open technologies, like distributed objects, the Java programming language, semantic tagging and the extensible markup language. It offers a definition of agents. According to the author, just as a word processor works through the medium of words, and spreadsheets work through numbers, agents work through the medium of actions. Agents are atomic software entities operating through autonomous actions on behalf of the user, machines and humans, without constant human intervention. This definition allows people to branch into all sorts of agent types, intelligent, mobile, multiagent systems, and profiling. It also makes it possible for this section to explore them by way of several features and a number of related sidebars.