Sacrificing vs. Salvaging Coherence: An Issue for Adaptive Agents in Information Navigation

Currently numerous research efforts are under way with the objective of designing intelligent agents for information navigation which have the capability to adapt to the changing informational needs of their users. "Individualization" is to help users cope with the flood of information made available by large information repositories (e.g., the WWW). One challenge in the design of such agents for information navigation lies in striking a balance between the opposing goals of (1) low access cost for highly relevant information and (2) the preservation of coherence of the information. This paper proposes means of assessing access costs and "loss of coherence" in a manner that can help adaptive agents strike a viable compromise between both competing forces.