Combining Information from Multiple Internet Sources

which allowed testing of these there approaches; this question could be answered, at least to some
extent. Approaches differ in ways of data processing and combination yet they could be brought to a
form that is unified and thus comparable. This unification process is described in chapter 3 which
presents implementation of those three approaches. Preliminary testing of those approaches was
performed and the results are presented in further parts of the document. Tests which were
conducted provide a view on the implemented information processing methods – how they perform
when compared to single search engines and to each other; which approach yielded the “best”
results and which has proven to be the “weakest” one.
1.2 Thesis outline
Chapter 2 presents the design of the tool which was used to help in testing those approaches.
Chapter contains the description of all communication between parts of the system as well as the
test application implementation details and the general application work flow.
Chapter 3 presents the three approaches: Game theory based, Auction based and Consensus
based methods for information combining. Chapter presents their background, implementation and
workflows.
Chapter 4 presents the tests that were conducted during work on this thesis. This chapter
presents results of the three approaches and their comparison under certain conditions. Chapter also
contains the conclusions describing the test results.
Chapter 5 presents final remarks on tests and possibilities of future work concerning combining
information from multiple Internet sources.
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