The Role of Java in InfoSleuth: Agent-based Exploitation of Heterogeneous Information Resources

Finding, retrieving, and integrating information from geographically disparate data resources is a difficult problem that large organizations have faced for decades. In recent years, the size and variety of data networks have increased dramatically, and a host of new issues have been raised by the need to mine information from dynamic sources such as the World Wide Web, where information is constantly being updated, there is a high-level of local autonomy, and central control is almost non-existent. InfoSleuth is a consortial research project at MCC which is developing technologies for addressing these issues. Based on MCC’s successful Carnot project, InfoSleuth is developing a network of semi-autonomous software agents which perform semantic data integration and retrieval across a widely distributed network environment. To achieve this, the project employs recent advances in ontology management, data mining, workflow automation, object brokering and language translation. The InfoSleuth architecture consists of agents communicating with each other via the high-level language KQML. Queries are specified in the flexible knowledge representation language KIF, with respect to common ontologies that are managed in knowledge-base management systems such as Ontolingua and CLIPS. The queries are routed by mediation and brokerage agents to specialized agents for data retrieval from distributed resources, and for integration and analysis of results. User interaction with this web of agents is via a personalized intelligent user agent which communicates with the user via Java applets running inside a Java-capable Web browser such as Netscape.