Cooperative Agents for Conceptual Search and
Browsing of World Wide Web Resources
Susan Gauch
Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
University of Kansas
Contact Information
Dr. Susan Gauch
Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
415 Snow Hall
University of Kansas
Lawrence, KS 66045
Phone: (785) 864-8817
Fax : (785) 864-3226
Email: sgauch@eecs.ukans.edu
WWW PAGE
Co-operative Agents Project Home Page
Keywords
information retrieval, co-operative agents, classification, query routing,
distributed browsing, visualization
Project Award Information
Cooperative Agents for Conceptual Search and
Browsing of World Wide Web Resources, Year one of a 4 year grant, 1997-2001.
Project Summary
Our primary goals are four fold:
1) to investigate the effectiveness/efficiency tradeoffs of using
co-operating distributed searching agents for the Web
2) to evaluate the effectiveness of ontology-based Web browsing agents
3) to study the feasibility of visualization agents as a mechanism to provide
a holistic overview of the conceptual organization of information on the Web
as a whole
4) to keep a record of changes to the ontology to study how quickly
information changes on the Web
Our approach employs co-operating, distributed, intelligent agents
to organize information on the Web. Each participating Web site
uses local agents to characterize the local information with respect to
a conceptual ontology. Further local agents support search, browsing and
visualization of the local information.
By sharing summarized content-based meta-information with regional agents,
regional browsing, search and visualization can be supported.
Goals, Objectives, and Targeted Activities
We have completed the initial versions of the local characterizing agent which,
given an ontology, weights
the nodes of the ontology with respect to information collected from the
local site. We have also completed the initial versions of the local
search agent and the local browsing agent (which allows users to browse the
weighted ontology and see the Weg pages automatically attached to each node).
Our goals for next year are to develop initial prototypes of the
regional agents and evaluate the effectiveness of our distributed
approach with respect to a single centralized collection of Web pages.
Indication of Success
We have been able to characterize several different Web sites with respect to
our ontology entirely automatically. In addition, a content-based browsing
structure for those sites has been built entirely automatically. Informal
evaluations have found that the weights on the nodes provide useful clues
for users and that the node weights reflect the site contents. Formal
evaluation experiments are planned for the upcoming year. In particular,
the ability of the weighted ontologies to form the basis of query routing
will be a major focus for 1998-1999. Long range impacts may be the development
of much higher precision, more focused searching for online Web resources.
Queries can be sent to only the most promising sites for processing, rather
than using the current search approach as treating all documents from all
sites equally.
Project Impact and Outcome
Two graduate students and one undergraduate student have been supported on this
award. One graduate student has since graduated and is now working in industry
and the other, a female student, is pursuing her Ph.D.
Our exposure to the importance of modern graphical user
interfaces has led to a change in our undergraduate curriculum to feature
Java in our introductory courses. In addition, a new course on
Information Retrieval (EECS 767) has been added to our regular offerings.
There is potential for technology transfer to ProFusion, L.L.C., to enhance
the query routing capabilities of the
ProFusion meta-search engine.
Project References
Intelligent Information Agents for the World Wide Web,
Edgar Casasola and Susan Gauch.
Information and Telecommunication Technology Center, Technical Report
ITTC-FY97-TR-11100-1.
Intelligent Information Agents:
Review and Challenges for Distributed
Information Sources,
Donna Haverkamp and Susan Gauch.
To appear in: Journal of the American Society for Information Science.
An Adaptive Multi-Agent Architecture for
the ProFusion* Meta Search System, Yizhong Fan and Susan Gauch,
Proc. of WebNet '97: The Second World Conference of the Web Society,
Toronto, ON, November 1997.
ProFusion: Intelligent Fusion from Multiple,
Distributed Search Engines, Susan Gauch, Guijun Wang and Mario Gomez,
Journal of Universal Computing, Springer-Verlag, Vol. 2 (9), Sept. 1996.
Information Fusion With ProFusion,
Susan Gauch and Guijun Wang,
Proc. of WebNet '96: The First World Conference of the Web Society,
San Francisco, CA, October 1996. pp. 174-179.
Area Background
Initially, information on the World Wide Web was found by random browsing,
a time consuming and ineffective method. Now, all-encompassing on-line
search engines make finding information much easier. In fact, it has
become too easy. It is not unusual to find 4,000 items or more which
match a given query. What is needed is not just a search engine that
produces better results but rather an organization of the search results
based on the concepts contained in the various Web pages. The search
process must also become more distributed, removing the incredible demand
placed on the handful of popular search sites. In addition, searching
is not the only desirable way to access information - users should be
able to browse through the Web in an organized manner. Several search
engines provide subject hierarchies which can be browsed, but the associated
Web pages are manually placed in the categories which limits the amount
of information available. In addition, each time the user visits a new
node in the ontology, a page must be sent from the centralized server,
making browsing a tedious activity. Finally, both searching and browsing
allow users to view only a tiny portion of the World Wide Web. They are
effective means of getting a detailed, partial picture but do not provide
an abstraction or overview of the Web as a whole from a conceptual level: What kind of information is available today? How is the information available
on the Web changing? These broader questions are essentially unanswerable
today.
The main open questions that this area related to this research
are the following:
To address these issues, we need to learn more about agent communication,
information summarization and information presentation.
In general, an active area of research is the use of search agents. Some
search agents are specifically designed to locate
information available from various home pages on the World Wide Web. These
agents mask the complexity of the Information Superhighway and filter the
exploding amount of information available. ProFusion [Gauch et al, 1996], for
example, contains a mediator agent which interacts with information agents
representing underlying Web search engines. The mediator selects which
information agents/search engines are best for individual queries, and fuses
the multiple search results.
Many other projects create agents which act on behalf of individual users.
Webwatcher [Armstrong et al, 1995], Letizia [Lieberman, 1995] and
[Balabanovic and
Shoham, 1995] incorporate learning from relevance feedback to assist the user
in browsing the Web for interesting pages. Amalthaea [Moukas, 1996] searches
the Web on behalf of a user. It spawns many agents per user (approximately 400)
to query Web search engines and filter the results, employing genetic algorithms
for query generation. The Internet Softbot [Etzioni and Weld, 1995] differs
from previous systems in that it accepts high-level user goals and decides
on the sequence of actions (Internet commands) required to satisfy
those goals. It deals with structured information services such as weather
map servers and stock quote servers, and it can handle notification requests
by monitoring any of a variety of events and reporting important occurrences
to the user autonomously.
Area References
Armstrong, R., Freitag, D., Joachims, T., and Mitchell, T. "Webwatcher: A
Learning
Apprentice for the World Wide Web," Proc. of the Symposium on Information
Gathering from Heterogenous, Distributed Environments, AAAI Press, 1995.
Balanovic, M. and Shoham, Y. "Learning Information Retrieval Agents:
Experiments with Automated Web Browsing,S AAAI Technical Report SS-95-08,
Proc. of the 1995 AAAI Spring Symposium Series, AAAI Press, 1995.
Etzioni O. and Weld, D. "Intelligent Agents on the Internet: Fact,
Fiction, and
Forecast," IEEE Expert, vol. 10, no. 4, 1995, pp. 44-49.
Gauch, S., Wang, G. and Gomez, M. "ProFusion: Intelligent Fusion from
Multiple,
Distributed Search Engines," Journal of Universal Computer Science,
Vol. 2 , No. 9, September 1996, 637-649.
Lieberman, H. "Letizia, an Agent that Assists Web Browsing,S Proc. of IJCAI-95
AAAI Press, 1995.
Moukas, A. "Amalthaea: Information Discovery and Filtering using a Multiagent
Evolving Ecosystem,S Proc. of the Conf. on the Practical Application of
Intelligent Agents and Multi-Agent Technology, London, 1996.
Potential Related Projects
Related work on content identification is being done by award #9712069,
"Automatic Identification of Significant Topics in Domain Independent
Full Text Analysis," and also work on retrieving data from distributed sources
in award #9712239, "Integration of Information from Internet Sources".
This project is also relevant to the Knowledge and Distributed Intelligence
program.