An Architecture for Information Retrieval Agents

Marina del Rey, CA 90292, USA {KNOBLOCK,ARENS}QISI.ED Abstract sources that are available to it. Given an information 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 loprocess the data, uses knowledge about the data to recate, 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 demore promising approach is to build specialized scribes how this approach supports multiple, collaboinformation 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 architecture 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 organizaarchitecture supports agents that are modular, extion of the vast number of information sources and pro-