Ontology-Based Information Gathering Agents

A well-known problem of World Wide Web (WWW) is that it contains ultra-large amount of information that often makes it difficult for users to find out their desired information. We propose and implement architecture of ontology-based information gathering agents. The ontology is represented by object-oriented approach with procedural attachments. The information gathering agents could carry out the search by wrapping the search engines of various kinds as their search methods and perform planning and integration of the partial information gathering results. The users also can represent their queries in terms of the shared domain ontology to reduce their conceptual gaps with agents. It shows how information gathering agents could utilize domain knowledge and integrate information gathered from disparate information resources and provide much more coherent results for the users.