Agent Systems for Information-Gathering

Information retrieval and database technology has long been interested in the problems of retrieving relevant information from vast data and information stores. The availability of information on the Internet, however, has spawned a new technological need: information gathering. Information gathering involves searching distributed, possibly heterogeneous data sources to answer a query. This paper surveys agent systems for information gathering and integration. We refine and unify terminology used by those systems and their researchers by examining the various representations, algorithms and architectures in use.