Scalability and information agents

Abstract

Having fast and dependable access to the most relevant information available is of the utmost importance in a competitive information-oriented society. Ensuring transparent and dependable access to a large number of heterogeneous, ill-structured and often distributed data and information sources is a complex problem with many different facets. Over time a large variety of very different approaches have been developed. Among the many competing approaches, information agents seem to be particularly well suited to the challenges of the information cyberspace due to their highly adaptive and distributed problem solving. Only information agents seem capable to offer the much needed user centric access to the myriads of data and information sources accessible via the web. But just like other agents, they require significant computational resources making it difficult to build scalable systems.This paper has two aims. First it is an attempt to draw attention to the scalability challenges in developing systems consisting of large numbers of information agents. Second, it presents a CORBA based framework called DICE for building information agents and reports about its use in developing real world systems based on information agents.