Bottom-up clustering and top-down shattering of scale-free environments for information fusion

We consider information fusion an ‘active service’, which aims to adapt the presentation of the information to the user. Our work concerns the Internet, a scale-free small world graph, with the tasks being the evaluation of documents, novelty detection and collecting novel documents of ‘high value’ for the sake of the user. This procedure calls for user-computer interaction. To this end, four algorithms have been designed and are under testing in various Internet environments. The weblog algorithm utilizes competitive value-estimating agents and shatters the Internet domain. Bottom-up clustering develops tree-structured cluster hierarchies and alleviates navigation. Keyword extraction chooses the best keywords that match subsets of the clusters. Linkhighlighting makes use of user reinforcement, ranks Internet documents and closes the loop: It provides feedback to the weblog algorithm to improve value estimation and the shattering of the domain. Details about the algorithms are provided.