The information access and retrieval capabilities provided by several conventional search engines, while improving upon traditional techniques, are lacking in supporting conceptual information retrieval capabilities, natural language input, and individual user preferences. This paper presents SAIRE - a Scalable Agent-based Information Retrieval Engine, a multiagent search engine (a.k.a. softbot) employing intelligent software agents, natural language understanding, and conceptual search techniques to support public access to Earth and Space Science data over the Internet. SAIRE provides an integrated user interface to distributed data sources maintained by NASA and NOAA, thereby hiding complex information retrieval protocols from users. Our experience developing SAIRE has demonstrated the feasibility of a multi-agent architecture, multi-agent collaboration, and communication between people and agents to support intelligent information access and retrieval. Our approach for resolving t...
Jidé B. Odubiyi, David J. Kocur, Stuart M.