BIG: An agent for resource-bounded information gathering and decision making

The World Wide Web has become an invaluable information resource but the ex plosion of available information has made Web search a time consuming and c omplex process. The large number of information sources and their different levels of accessibility, reliability and associated costs present a comple x information gathering control problem. This paper describes the rationale , architecture, and implementation of a next generation information gatheri ng system-a system that integrates several areas of Artificial Intelligence research under a single umbrella. Our solution to the information explosio n is an information gathering agent, BIG, that plans to gather information to support a decision process, reasons about the resource trade-offs of dif ferent possible gathering approaches, extracts information from both unstru ctured and structured documents, and uses the extracted information to refi ne its search and processing activities. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.