Handling linguistic web information based on a multi-agent system

Much information over the Internet is expressed by natural languages. The management of linguistic information involves an operation of comparison and aggregation. Based on the Ordered Weighted Averaging (OWA) operator and modifying indexes of linguistic terms (their indexes are fuzzy numbers on [0, T] subset of R+), new linguistic aggregating methods are presented and their properties are discussed. Also, based on a multi-agent system and new linguistic aggregating methods, gathering linguistic information over the Internet is discussed. Moreover, by fixing the threshold a, "soft filtering information" is proposed and better Web pages (or documents) that the user needs are obtained. (c) 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.