Agent-Based Coordination of Regional Information Services

This paper proposes an agent-based framework for coordinating heterogeneous regional information services. It is necessary to deal with distributed and heterogeneous information services since regional information sources are geographically distributed and the characteristics of regions vary the required regional information according to regions. It is also necessary to integrate information user-adaptively since users of regional information services have specific characteristics, such as knowledge about the region. In this paper, we propose an agent-based framework that consists of server and user agents. Some server agents wrap distributed regional information servers to provide flexible communication. Some server agents provide certain mediation services, such as ontology translation, to enable the coordination of heterogeneous information servers. Each user agent integrates information received from other agents according to a user model to enable the provision of user-adapted information. A prototype system, called the GeoLinkAgent system, has been implemented based on the framework.