European Research and Development of Intelligent Information Agents: The AgentLink Perspective

The vast amount of heterogeneous information sources available in the Internet demands advanced solutions for acquiring, mediating, and maintaining relevant information for the common user. The impacts of data, system, and semantic heterogeneity on the information overload of the user are manifold and especially due to potentially significant differences in data modeling, data structures, content representations using ontologies and vocabularies, query languages and operations to retrieve, extract, and analyse information in the appropriate context. The impacts of the increasing globalisation on the information overload encompass the tedious tasks of the user to determine and keep track of relevant information sources, to efficiently deal with different levels of abstractions of information modeling at sources, and to combine partially relevant information from potentially billions of sources. A special type of intelligent software agents [92],[36],[95], so called information agents, is supposed to cope with these difficulties associated with the information overload of the user. This implies its ability to semantically broker information [82] by providing pro-active resource discovery, resolving the information impedance of information consumers and providers in the Internet, and offering value-added information services and products to the user or other agents. In subsequent sections we briefly introduce the reader to the notion of such type of agents as well as one of the prominent European forums for research on and development of these agents, the AgentLink special interest group on intelligent information agents. This book includes presentations of advanced systems of information agents and solution approaches to different problems in the domain that have been developed jointly by members of this special interest group in respective working groups.