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An Information Broker for Adaptive Distributed Resource Discovery
Service
Introduction
Arkadi Kosmynin
Division of Information Technology
Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation
Australia
Arkadi.Kosmynin@mel.dit.csiro.au
Abstract: In the paper we describe What’sHot: a resource discovery system under development
that uses active agents (information brokers) to organise distributed dynamic adaptive indexes of
resources. What’sHot utilises the information, that is available as a side effect of human search
and retrieval activity, to maintain indexes of valuable resources. The system is designed to
provide scalable index service on the Internet and to facilitate co-operative information filtering.
This paper discusses design and philosophy of What’sHot.
Rapid growth of the Internet and WWW [December 94] produces an urgent need for tools which assist people
in search for resources on the Net. In this paper we present a simple idea: a decentralised, distributed and
changing environment, such as the Internet, needs a corresponding dynamic, distributed, adaptive index
service.
The existing resource discovery systems can be divided into two major categories in relation to information
suppliers and users. The first group consists of systems which build and optimise indexes and directories of
available resources. Large centralised indexes (Alta Vista, InfoSeek, Excite, ALIWEB [Koster 94], WebCrawler
[Pinkerton 94]), directories (Yahoo, WebDirectory, McKinley Directory), and distributed indexing systems
(WHOIS++ [Weider 96], Harvest [Bowman 95], Discover [Sheldon 95]) belong to this group.
The second group consists of systems which try to actively assist users in their search process. These systems
organise search process using information about users’ preferences and interests. Intelligent agents (Jasper
[Davies 95], InfoScout [Voorhees 94], WEBDOGGIE) and user interfaces/smart query routers (BabyOIL
[Ianella 95]) form this group.
The disadvantage of the current situation is that these two groups are isolated in the index building/optimising
stage. Given that adequate resource discovery indexes must be dynamic to adapt to the Internet’s changes, the
information obtained from users should be utilised to control those dynamics and to optimise the indexes.
The Internet is a product of collaborative efforts of millions of people and there is a huge amount of human
activity happening every single moment on the Net. This activity has a potential to be transparently used to
make the Net’s anarchy self-organising. What’sHot uses active agents to organise distributed dynamic adaptive
indexes of meta-information. Units of meta-information (abstracts) travel from index to index, automatically
finding their way to a consumer. It is scalable, economic, and adapts as the environment changes (change of
resources available on the Net and changes in people’s interests). It uses the joint expertise of the Net
community to assist people in search for valuable resources. It has a number of other distinguishing features
which we describe in this paper.
What’sHot