An Architecture for Information Retrieval Agents
Craig A. Knoblock, Yigal Arens · 1994
Abstract sources that are available to it. Given an informa-tion request, an agent identifies an appropriate set of With the vast number of information resources information sources, generates a plan to retrieve and available today, a critical problem is how to lo- process the data, uses knowledge about the data to re-cate, retrieve and process information. It would formulate the plan, and then executes it. This paper be impractical to build a single unified system that describes our approach to the issues of representation, combines all of these information resources. A communication, problem solving, and learning, and de-more promising approach is to build specialized scribes how this approach supports multiple, collabo-information retrieval agents that provide access rating information retrieval agents. to a subset of the information resources and can send requests to other information retrieval agents Representing the Knowledge of an when needed. In this paper we present an archi-tecture for building such agents that addresses the Agent issues of representation, communication, problem Each information agent is specialized to a particular solving, and learning. We also describe how this area of expertise. This provides a modular organiza-