An agent-based framework for Web query answering

The World Wide Web has become a rich information source from which answers to numerous questions can be found. However, there exist discrepancies between the queries by users and the answers provided by the information sources, due to ill-defined requirements and the irregular nature of Web information sources. Thus, the traditional rigid mechanism for database query answering is unsuitable for complex Web mining tasks. A flexible and cooperative query answering mechanism needs to be used to overcome the discrepancies. In this paper, we propose an agent-based framework for such Web query answering. An object-oriented deductive data model and a flexible query language are introduced, and a cooperation mechanism for query answering based on our data model and query language is presented.