Title :
A multi-agent system architecture for information gathering
Author :
Shakshuki, Elhadi ; Ghenniwa, Hamada ; Kamel, Mohamed
Author_Institution :
Dept. of Syst. Design Eng., Waterloo Univ., Ont., Canada
Abstract :
The World Wide Web (WWW) is a vast repository of information. Although there is a great value for this information, its size, dynamic and distribution nature put a significant amount of time and effort to locate, retrieve and integrate the desired information. In addition, different users usually have different views and interest for the same information. The paper proposes a multi-agent architecture that enables cooperation to assist different users to locate, retrieve and integrate information from the WWW. The system architecture comprises three tiers. At the front end, the user agents interact with the users to fulfil their interests and preferences. At the back end, the resource agents access and capture the content and changes of the information resources. At the middle tier, the broker agents facilitate cooperation among the agents to fulfil the user´s desires. A prototype of the proposed system was implemented using the IBM Agent Building Environment Toolkit. The objective is to demonstrate how the agents can cooperate to transparently locate, retrieve and integrate information from dynamic and distributed information resources, utilizing the Internet search engines
Keywords :
information resources; information retrieval; multi-agent systems; online front-ends; IBM Agent Building Environment Toolkit; Internet search engines; WWW; World Wide Web; broker agents; distributed information resources; information gathering; information repository; information resources; multi-agent system architecture; resource agents; system architecture; user agents; Design engineering; Information resources; Information retrieval; Intelligent agent; Internet; Multiagent systems; Search engines; Web pages; Web sites; World Wide Web;
Conference_Titel :
Database and Expert Systems Applications, 2000. Proceedings. 11th International Workshop on
Conference_Location :
London
Print_ISBN :
0-7695-0680-1
DOI :
10.1109/DEXA.2000.875107