An Agent-Oriented Approach to the Integration of Information Sources

Abstract. The success of the Internet and the World Wide Web opened new ways of information supply. While more and more information sources become available, people are faced with the problem of information overload. New kinds of information systems are needed. They give people searching for information the opportunity to participate in the new development and profit from the new information sources that become available through the Web. A special challenge for Web information system modeling arises from the openness of the system: Everything is liable to change, and information sources come and go without further notice. In this paper, we present an approach to a flexible information system that is able to adapt to a dynamic environment. We present the agent-oriented architecture of the information system and the realization of this system in the application domain of scientific literature.