Multimedia Information Gathering Based on a Society of Cooperative Agents

Information is useless if it cannot be located. This task is becoming more complex with the explosion in the amount of electronically available information. Further, in order to take advantage of the expressiveness of multimedia information, the existing information system need to extend its processing, storage and retrieval capabilities to include the new media types like image, audio, and video. In this paper, we propose a completely agent-based approach for multimedia Information Gathering on a information network with a large number of distributed heterogeneous sources, such as Internet. Locating and accessing information in such a large distributed system which changes dynamically is challenging and is most suitable for agentbased solutions. We rst propose a CAS model to express a Society of Cooperative Agents, then review the drawbacks of existing non-agent and partially agentbased solutions for locating information on Internet. Finally, we explain how our completely agent-based solution based on the proposed CAS model overcome the weak point of the existing approaches. keywords | Society of Agents, Distributed Multimedia Information Systems