Abstract: A method and system for constructing rule-based intelligent agents that process events on behalf of one or more users. The intelligent agents have event-generating modules that supply events to be processed, and event-processing modules that process the events by evaluating rules. Each event-processing module of the agent includes multiple sets of rules, one or more such sets for each user of the agent. A selection key related to the user is associated with a rule set, and for event-generating modules a selection key indicates the user on whose behalf the event was generated. When the event-processing module receives an event with a selection key, the module locates and evaluates the rule set(s) which have a matching key to launch the corresponding actions.