Combining Information from Multiple Internet Sources

2. Design of the tool used for testing
This chapter presents the design of the tool that was developed to aid information retrieval
and to test the algorithms for query processing. This is the first main step in the thesis; development
of a simple tool which would aid in comparing the methods of combining the information retrieved
from the Internet. The tool is a web application allowing for inputting the queries and selection of
the response-composition method. The main engine of the application is the answer processor – it
contains implementations of all three methods and it retrieves the information from the Internet. It
was developed to aid testing of Game theory, Auction, and Consensus based approaches and to aid
in comparing the results yielded by the search engines.
By creating a web application, its main aim was to make it easy to use; as an ordinary search
engine. The difference from ordinary search engines is as follows: since this application was built
for the purpose of testing of the answer processing methods, a method must be selected when
issuing the query. Method is selected to provide the information about which combining algorithm
is going to be tested. When a query is input and an algorithm is selected the application starts the
retrieval and combining of the data. Afterwards, when the answer processing is finished its results
are displayed as URLs which can be accessed as a hyperlink. Sometimes feedback to the application
must be provided so that it can learn which answer was considered the most valuable and also to
rank the search engines. Ranking procedure is very simple, yet it was implemented to learn which
engines provide most commonly used results.
This chapter of the thesis will present the design of the tool that can be divided into two
parts: application part and database part. The application part is written in Java language, while the
database is the MySQL database.
The application is very simple since it was created only for testing purposes. It was not the
main aim of the thesis and that is why it was written in a simple way. However, it had to be
implemented since without it tests would be impossible to conduct. The following part presents the
application part of the test application.
5