- 作者: SOE-TSYR YUAN
- 中文摘要: In the age of information era, a growing number of information sources are available online, such as company wide databases and Web documents. Currently, users have to expend a large amount of effort in finding and querying each source in isolation, and must combine information manually. That is, the phenomenal growth of information sources on the Internet/Web has burdened Internet/Web users with information overload. Furthermore, the task of information gathering and integration often does not stand alone but must operate together with other application systems; whenever changes are made to application systems, corresponding modifications to the process of information gathering and integration must be made. Therefore, the goal of information gathering and integration is to consistently provide convenient access to multiple sources of information, such as multiple databases, documents on the World Wide Web (WWW), ftp archives, and digital libraries. However, there are some difficulties in the process of information gathering and integration, which are encountered because sources are autonomous and heterogeneous, contain closely related data, and are numerous and constantly changing and need to operate together with application systems which evolve over time. Previous works on the problem of information gathering and integration, in general, did not tackle all these difficulties. In this paper, we claim that the generic idea of an ontology-based agent community provides a simple solution to the problem of information gathering and integration for various types of online information while considering all the difficulties mentioned above. We support this claim by showing how the idea of an ontology-based agent community provides a feasible solution for the two practical information systems implemented at our institution: Multy (a decentralized virtual mall) and Yais (yet another interactive intelligent Web search).
- 英文摘要: --
- 中文關鍵字: information gathering and integration, ontology, software agents, multi-agent systems
- 英文關鍵字: --