A Market Collaborative Agents-based Framework for Information Retrieval

The Information Retrieval in the World Wide Web (Web IR) plays an important role in the use of the Internet. An information retrieval process begins when a user enters a formal statements of information needs, known as query, into the system and ends when results are given. Results consist of several objects that match the query with different degrees of relevancy. The relevancy of the results is still an important concern and is often associated with the volume of the results: getting better relevancy involves bigger volume of returned information while lesser volume involves lower relevancy. This issue makes the Web IR an active domain of research and development. Since a decade, an interest was given to software agents technology and its applications. Agents have been successfully used in many fields: agents-based market systems prove to be efficient for implementing e-commerce or B2B applications on the Internet, thanks to inherent properties such as prominency of interactions, collaboration between agents, autonomy, scalability, flexibility, interoperability, etc. Although the use of agents in other application domains is not yet widespread, the integration of agents into market mechanisms bring clear and efficient solutions to Quality of Service (QoS) issues encountered in most distributed applications and notably in Web IR systems. Mobility allows defining a new interaction model, where agents act on behalf of final users or devices providing resources, while Market Places provide an organizational setting for the matching of demands and offers. This paper, a renewed form of [1], will show how market mechanisms and mobility can ease collaboration between agents to deliver a service with relevant results in Web IR.