An intelligent information gathering method for dynamic information mediators

Abstract

AbstractThe Internet is spreading into our society rapidly and is becoming one of the information infrastructures that are indispensable for our daily life. In particular, the WWW is widely used for various purposes such as sharing personal information, academic research, business work, and electronic commerce, and the amount of available information is increasing rapidly. We usually utilize information sources on the Internet as individual stand‐alone sources, but if we can integrate them, we can add more value to each of them. Hence, information mediators, which integrate information distributed on the Internet, are drawing attention. In this paper, under the assumption that the information sources to be integrated are updated frequently and asynchronously, we propose an information gathering method that constructs an answer to a query from a user, accessing information sources to be integrated properly within an allowable time period. The proposed method considers the reliability of data in the cache and the quality of answer in order to efficiently access information sources and to provide appropriate answers to the user. As evaluation, we show the effectiveness of the proposed method by using an artificial information integration problem, in which some parameters can be modified, and a real‐world flight information service compared with a conventional FIFO information gathering method. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Syst Comp Jpn, 33(9): 11–20, 2002; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/scj.10119