An Agent-Oriented Approach to the Integration of Information Sources

An Agent-Oriented Approach to the Integration of Information Sources

Michael ChristoffelInstitute for Program Structures and Data Organization,

University of Karlsruhe, Germany

Workshop on Web Information Systems Modeling,

Riga, Latvia

2004 June 8

Michael Christoffel: An Agent-Oriented Approach to the Integration of Information Sources WISM 2004

Overview

• Information Integration

• Open Market Model

• Integration Architecture

• Realization

• Conclusion


Overview




• Realization

• Conclusion


Value of Information

• Information has become a valuable good

• More and more services available through the Internet– traditional libraries– booksellers– publishing houses– new kinds of services

• Commercialization of the Internet


Information Overload

• Information is distributed – large number of computers

and databases

• Information providers – are independent from each

other

• Customer has to– find, compare, access,

purchase, transform, combine,...

– sequentially


Idea of Information Integration

• Provide a uniform access to all information sources

• Hide the heterogeneity and distribution of the different sources

• Keep independence of individual services

Integration


Overview




• Realization

• Conclusion


Idea of an Open Market

• Model of an open market

• Customers and providers– may appear and leave at

any time– communicate through

interfaces that are adapted to their needs

• Internals of the market are hidden

Market


Market Agents

• Market is inhabited by market agents– can come and go– independent acting– communicative– no definite relations– agents have to learn how to

cope with their environment– different agents types– can have external interfaces


Advantages

• Scalable and extensible– new agents at runtime– new agent types at runtime– by different organizations

• Interface agents– adaptable to customers– tailored to providers


Advantages

• Communication is based on Web services– no additional middleware– independent from operating

systems and hardware platform

• Increased robustness by redundancies

• Secure transmission– encryption– digital signatures


Overview




• Realization

• Conclusion


Architecture Overview

• Application of the open market model

• 15 different agent types implemented until now


Provider Support

• Provider Agent– interface of the provider to

the system– at least one provider agent

for each provider– access control– query pre-processing– query optimization– uses existing interfaces of

the provider


Provider Support

• Provider Agents for Web Interfaces– provider agent can be

adapted by a source description

– identifying search form and search parameters

– extracting data elements from result pages

– path expressions and regular expressions

– (semi-)automatic generation


Provider Support

• Provider Agents for Web Interfaces– provider agent can be

adapted by a source description

– identifying search form and search parameters

– extraction data elements from result pages

– path expressions and regular expressions

– (semi-)automatic generation


Result Integration

• Integration Agent– parallel execution of queries– dynamic integration of

results to final result list– incremental process– automatic grouping– duplicate elimination


Provider Selection

• Provider Selection Agent– hold metadata on available

provider– find appropriate providers

for a customer demand


Customer Support

• Customer Agent– represent the interests of

the customers– one customer agent for

several customers– adapted to individual

customers or customer groups

– provide personal workspace


Customer Support

• Personal Workspace– individual for each customer– will be preserved during two

sessions– agenda– past queries and results– virtual hand library– annotations– get in contact with other

customers– exchange documents with

other customers


Customer Support

• Customer Interface Agent– interface of the customers

to the system– supports favorite look and

feel of a customer– supports different

languages (configurable)– can use different customer

agents– can be adapted to different

visual interfaces







visual interfaces

Customer Support







visual interfaces

Customer Support


Other Agent Types

• Customer Organization A.

• Customer Authentication A.

• Agent Authentication A.

• Billing Agent

• Payment Agent

• Generator Agent

• Billboard Agent

• Agent/Group Naming A.

• System Administration A.


Agent Groups

• Examples:– parallel result integration– extended search space for

Provider Selection Agents– moving/copying customer

profiles– coordination of source

description generation process

– handling backup and redundancies


Overview




• Realization

• Conclusion


Agent Communities

• Agent communities hold one or more agents– agents share resources– agents can migrate from

one community to another

• Communication among communities– based on Web services– choice between regular and

secure transmission

External Communication

CommunicationModule

AdministrationModule

AgentContainer

Web

Ser

vice

Inte

rfac

e

Secure Communication

Security Module


Agent Communities

• Four ways of message interchange– agent– group– community– systemExternal

Communication

CommunicationModule

AdministrationModule

AgentContainer

Web

Ser

vice

Inte

rfac

e

Secure Communication

Security Module


Agent Communities

• Four ways of message interchange– agent– group– community– system

• Control panel– access to all agents in the

community


Task Execution

• Contexts– can contain several

messages– can be used by more than

one agent

• Work objects– save the messages of an

active context– can be deleted when they

are no longer used – are stored in the work

queueWork Queue

Work Object

Message Object

Context


Overview




• Realization

• Conclusion


Project Background

• The presented work – is part of the

interdisciplinary research project ModernMart

• Project team– department of computer

science– department of business

administration and economics

– university library


Project Background

• The ModernMart project – is part of the German

national research initiative in Digital Libraries“Distributed Processing and Delivery of Digital Documents” (V3D2)

– is supported by German Research Foundation (DFG)


Summary

• Integration of services in the scientific literature domain– hide heterogeneity and distribution– provide uniform access to the whole collection– keep the independence of existing information providers

• Model of the open market

• Integration architecture as an implementation of the market model

– various agent types

• Concept of agent communities– sharing resources– communication is based on Web services

An Agent-Oriented Approach to the Integration of Information Sources

Michael ChristoffelInstitute for Program Structures and Data Organization,

University of Karlsruhe, Germany

The End