A System of Digital Library based on Multi-level Agents

Jian-Yun Nie (Univ. of Montreal)  nie@IRO.UMontreal.CA
K. Hamard (Univ. of Montreal)
G.v. Bochmann (Univ. of Ottawa),
B. Kerherve (UQAM)
T. Radhakrishnan, Rajjan Shinghal, (Concordia)
James Turner (Univ. of Montreal)
Fadi Berouti, F.P. Ferrie (McGill)

Abstract

In this paper, we describe an architecture for digital library (DL) systems based on agents. The architecture is
inspired from Harvest and UMDL, but several extensions have been made. The most important extension
concerns the building of multi-level indexing and cataloguing. Search agents are either local or global. A global
search agent interacts with other agents of the system, and manages a set of local search agents. We also
extended the Z39.50 standard in order to account for the visual characteristics of images. Agents for multilingual
retrieval have also been integrated in our system. This study shows that the agent-based architecture is flexible
enough to integrate various kinds of agents and services in a single system.
 
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