The metaknowledge-based intelligent routing system (MIRS)

This paper addresses the issue of locating relevant information in a network of heterogeneous, unfederated information bases of various types, including structured databases, text, audio, picture and video ®les. The problem is to determine where the required information resides in a network, in locations unknown to the user. The objective is to construct a user-friendly, intelligent, search and routing mechanism in order to ®nd the most relevant information bases in the network. We introduce a mechanism for presenting queries, routing queries, updating knowledge, and learning in a metaknowledge base (MKB). This has been named the metaknowledge-based intelligent routing system (MIRS). MIRS ®nds the location of the desired information by its ability to ``understand'' the userÕs query and to access information by content, rather than by address. MIRS behaves like a distributed search engine, working with a distributed metaknowledge index-®le. There is no need for periodic web-crawling, web-robots, or agents of any sort. The network itself encapsulates the knowledge and routing algorithms that provide the user access-by-content to the relevant information. Contrary to web servers, the speci®c MIRS servers are not linked by hypertext links, but rather by knowledge links, randomly acquired or expertly built. The system also di€ers from the usual search engines in that it is capable of handling di€erent types of media (e.g., text, database, multimedia) and applies natural language parsing techniques to understand the intention of the user, as well as potentially use a user-pro®le to enhance the original query before distributing it over the network. The ``metadata'' describing the information bases are spread across a network of routing and information servers and are modi®ed as a result of search operations and introduction of new information bases into the system. Ó 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.