Design and Implementation of Agent Community Based Peer-to-Peer Information Retrieval Method

This paper presents an agent community based peer-to-peer information retrieval method called ACP2P method[16] and discusses the experimental results of the method. The ACP2P method uses agent communities to manage and look up information related to users. An agent works as a delegate of its user and searches for information that the user wants by communicating with other agents. The communication between agents is carried out in a peer-to-peer computing architecture. In order to retrieve information relevant to a user query, an agent uses a content file, which consists of retrieved documents and two histories : a query/retrieved document history(Q/RDH) and a query/sender agent history(Q/SAH). The former is a list of pairs of a query and the address of an agent that returned documents relevant to the query. The latter is a list of pairs of a query and the address of a sender agent and shows “who sent what query to the agent”. This is useful for finding a new information source. Making use of Q/SAH is expected to have a collaborative filtering effect, which gradually creates virtual agent communities, where agents with the same interests stay together. Our hypothesis is that a virtual agent community reduces communication loads necessary to perform a search. As an agent receives more queries, then more links to new knowledge are acquired. From this behavior, a “give and take”(or positive feedback) effect for agents seems to emerge. We implemented this method with Multi-Agent Kodama, and conducted experiments to test the hypothesis. The experimental results showed that the method employing two histories was much more efficient than a naive method employing ’multicast’ techniques only to look up a target agent. Further, making use of Q/SAH facilitates bidirectional communications between agents and thus creates virtual agent communities.