The World Wide Web has become an invaluable information resource but the explosion of information available via the web has made web search a time consuming and complex process. Index-based search engines, such as AltaVista, Google or Info seek help, but they are not enough. This paper describes the rationale, architecture, and implementation of a next generation information gathering system -a system that integrates several areas of Artificial Intelligence (AI) research under a single umbrella. Our solution to the information explosion is an information gathering agent, IIR, that plans to gather information to support a decision process, reasons about the resource trade-offs of different possible gathering approaches, extracts information from both unstructured and structured documents, and uses the extracted information to refine its search and processing activities.
The World Wide Web has become an invaluable information resource but the explosion of information available via the web has made web search a time consuming and complex process. Index-based search engines, such as AltaVista, Google or Info seek help, but they are not enough. This paper describes the rationale, architecture, and implementation of a next generation information gathering system – a system that integrates several areas of Artificial Intelligence (AI) research under a single umbrella. Our solution to the information explosion is an information gathering agent, IIR , that plans to gather information to support a decision process, reasons about the resource trade-offs of different possible gathering approaches, extracts information from both unstructured and structured documents, and uses the extracted information to refine its search and processing activities.