Virtual Proxy Servers for WWW and Intelligent Agents on the Internet

W orld-Wide W eb (WWW) becomes extremely popular in recent y ears. However, there still exists many fundamental problems not yet solved in a satisfactory way, s u c h as the information search, distribution, caching, ltering problems, etc.. Users still often suffers from long retrieval latency, and the lack of search function which can conduct localized search or hierarchical search. In this paper, we propose a framework for solving the above m e n tioned fundamental problems by i n troducing a new model of WWW proxy servers. In our model, a p r oxy is not just an add-in to existed Web servers to pr ovide cache and security functions, but works as a middle layer between browsers and Web servers, which can be plugged i n a variety of functions for WWW applic ations, such as search engine, resource index, information lter-ing, robot, prole, intelligent agents, etc.. It's a framework for implementing hierarchical information servers and it's the right place to plug in various intelligent agents. To illustrate the usefulness of our model, we h a ve implemented two fundamental functions into this middle layer : the object lookup scheme (collaborative caching) and the searchable proxy. W e call this extensible proxy server \Virtual Proxy". Since search and retrieval is the most fundamental problems in World Wide W eb, w e will present this paper in a way to show h o w these two problems can be solved in a better way using the Virtual Proxy servers.