A Software Retrieval Service Based on Adaptive Knowledge-Driven Agents for Wireless Environments EDUARDO MENA University of Zaragoza, Spain ARANTZA ILLARRAMENDI University of the Basque Country, Spain JOSE A. ROYO University of Zaragoza, Spain and ALFREDO GO ˜ NI University of the Basque Country, Spain The ability to retrieve software in an easy and efficient way confers competitive advantage on computer users in general and, even more especially, on users of wireless devices (like some laptops, PDAs, etc.). In this article, we present a software retrieval service that allows users to select and retrieve software in an easy and efficient way, anywhere and anytime. Two rel- evant components of this service are: 1) a software ontology (software catalog) which pro- vides users with a semantic description of software elements, hiding the location and access method of various software repositories, and 2) a set of specialist agents that allow brows- ing of the software catalog (automatically customized for each user), and an efficient retrieval method for the selected software. These agents automatically adapt their behavior to different users and situations by considering the profile and preferences of the users and the network status. In summary, our software-obtaining process based on an ontology and autonomous and adaptive agents presents a qualitative advance with respect to existing solutions: our approach adapts to the features of users, relieving them from knowing the technical features of their devices and the location and access method of various remote software repositories. Categories and Subject Descriptors: H.3.4 [Information Storage and Retrieval]: Systems and Software—Distributed systems, and alert services; I.2.11 [Artificial Intelligence]: Distributed This work was supported by the CICYT project TIN2004-07999-C02. Authors’ addresses: E. Mena, IIS Department, University of Zaragoza, Maria de Luna 1, 50018 Zaragoza, Spain; email: emena@unizar.es; A. Illarramendi, A. Go˜ ni, LSI Department, University of the Basque Country, Apdo. 649, 20080 San Sebastian, Spain; email: {jipileca,alfredo}@si.ehu.es; J. A. Royo, IEC Department, University of the Basque Country, Apdo. 649, 20080, San Sebastian, Spain; email: joalroyo@unizar.es. Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or direct commercial advantage and that copies show this notice on the first page or initial screen of a display along with the full citation. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers, to redistribute to lists, or to use any component of this work in other works requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Permissions may be requested from Publications Dept., ACM, Inc., 1515 Broadway, New York, NY 10036 USA, fax: +1 (212) 869-0481, or permissions@acm.org. C  2006 ACM 1556-4665/06/0900-0067 $5.00 ACM Transactions on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems, Vol. 1, No. 1, September 2006, Pages 67–90.