Network-Based Information Brokers

The general availability of the technology to build and maintain information brokers will enable an industry to be established whose primary products are computer-based network-accessible brokering services.

Abstract

ions and assumptions that will enable the agent to retrieve information that is relevant to a query. . Methods for appropriately combining and summarizing retrieved information. Building such brokers as ad hoc, monolithic applications will not scale, and the resulting brokers will not be able to interoperate with the new protocols and services being developed for the Internet. Technical Approach Our approach in this project is to enable the construction and maintenance of domain-specific information brokers by developing . Detailed specifications of a broker system architecture. . A broker shell that implements the broker architecture and contains implementations of all the architecture's domain-independent brokering facilities. . A domain and source modeling tool kit for developing and maintaining a broker's domainspecific expertise. . Two example brokers: a broker in the Electronic Commerce testbed being built in the CommerceNet project, and a broker in the pharmaceutical domain for...