CUSTOMIZING INFORMATION CAPTURE AND ACCESS

This article presents a customizable architecture for software agents that capture and access information in large, heterogeneous, distribut ed electronic repositories. The key idea is to exploit underlying stru cture at various levels of granularity to build high-level indices wit h task-specific interpretations. Information agents construct such ind ices and are configured as a network of reusable modules called struct ure detectors and segmenters. We illustrate our architecture with the design and implementation of smart information filters in two contexts : retrieving stock market data from Internet newsgroups and retrieving technical reports from Internet FTP sites.