Interoperability and semi-structured data in an open Web-based agent information system

摘要

The World Wide Web is a vast resource of information and services that continues to grow rapidly. How to find information providers and how to integrate information agents in such an open environment are new challenges. In this paper, we present an open multi-agent system called SportsAgents, for information gathering from the World Wide Web. In this system, middleware agents are introduced to solve the interoperability problem among information agents. Novel aspects in SportsAgents are an intelligent matchmaking algorithm for inferring the service relationships among information agents, and a naive Bayesian model for information agent cooperation formation is given. Information agents use score patterns to extract semi-structured sports results. All these make the system open and scalable to new applications and flexible for organising the agents' cooperation.