Combining Information from Multiple Internet Sources

Combining Information from Multiple Internet Sources
Abstract:
This thesis compares three approaches for combining information retrieved from the
Internet: Game theory based, Auction based and Consensus based. To compare those three
methods an application was created to aid extraction of information from multiple Internet
sources and to combine it using one of these methods. Application utilizes the JADE agent
platform, to retrieve and combine the information extracted from different search engines.
Each of three methods under consideration provides a different way to combine results
obtained from multiple sources to create a combined view presented as a single list of
results. Main aim of the thesis was to test the three methods; see what results each of them
can provide and to compare these results. The thesis presents the results; discusses their
effectiveness and subjective opinion on their coherency.
Approaches were tested as follows: at first the results which were provided by those
methods were compared to results of search engines which were used for extracting the data
in the first place. The results were investigated to see what URLs contributed to each of the
final answers, and from which search engines those URLs originated. Afterwards, the
results of methods were compared with each other, by means of investigation of the
resources which were pointed to by the URLs comprising the result sets returned by those
approaches. This approach to testing provided enough insight into the results, to be able to
check their quality.