An efficient plan execution system for information management agents

ABSTRACT

Recent work on information integration has yielded novel and efficient solutions for gathering data from the World Wide Web. However, there has been little attention given to the problem of providing information management capabilities that closely model how people interact with the web in productive ways - not only collecting information, but monitoring web sites for new or updated data, sending notifications based on the results, building reports, creating local repositories of information, and so on. These needs are unique to the dynamic nature of information in a networked environment. In this paper, we describe Theseus, an efficient plan execution system for information management agents. Through its plan language, Theseus supports a number of capabilities which enable practical information management, including repeated and periodic query execution, conditional plan declarations, query result aggregation, and flexible communication of results. The Theseus executor system focuses on efficiency, with support for data pipelining, and dataflow-based, event driven parallel execution. With Theseus, users can automate the complex but practical ways in which they interact with the web, for both information gathering and management.

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Index Terms

• Computing methodologies

  • Artificial intelligence

    • Distributed artificial intelligence

      • Intelligent agents

• Information systems

  • Information retrieval

  • Information storage systems