Summary: N E W D I R E C T I O N SN E W D I R E C T I O N S
Traditional approaches to building distrib-
uted or federated systems do not scale well.
Current systems, such as search engines or
topic directories on the World Wide Web,
provide only limited capabilities for locat-
ing, combining, processing, and organizing
information.
The solution to this problem is to pro-
vide access to the large number of informa-
tion sources by organizing them into a net-
work of information agents. Each agent
provides expertise on a specific topic by
drawing on relevant information from other
information agents. To build such a net-
work, we need an architecture for a single
agent that can be instantiated to provide
multiple agents. Our design is based on our
previous work on the SIMS system,1,2 an
information mediator that provides access

Source: Ambite, José Luis - Information Sciences Institute & Department of Computer Science, University of Southern California

Collections: Computer Technologies and Information Sciences