A dataflow approach to agent-based information management

Recent research has made it possible to build information agents that retrieve and integrate information from the World Wide Web. Although there now exist solutions for modeling Web sources, query planning, and information extraction, less attention has been given to the problem of optimizing agent execution. In this paper, we describe Theseus, an efficient plan execution system for information agents. Through its pipelined, dataflow-style architecture, Theseus offers a high degree of parallelism and asynchronous information routing during execution. Thesus differs from prior work in reactive planning systems and parallel databases because it gathers information from the Web. a domain where information retrieval is a problem that is network-bound and is often based on interleaved data gathering and navigation. The Theseus plan language and architecture directly address these issues, resulting in an efficient execution system.