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William P. Birmingham[1], Karen M. Drabenstott[2], Carolyn O. Frost[2], Amy J. Warner[2], and Katherine Willis[2]
[1] Advanced Technology Laboratory, College of Engineering, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109-2110, wpb@eecs.umich.edu
[2] School of Information and Library Studies, 550 East University Avenue, Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1092 USA, {karen.drabenstott, carolyn.frost, amy.warner, kathy.willis}@umich.edu
This paper uses the term "digital library" as a generic name for dynamic, federated structures that provide intellectual and physical access to the growing world-wide networks of information encoded in multimedia digital formats and examines research toward the broad goal of personalized harvesting in the information wilderness organized around agency-based architecture. Beginning from the perspective of the desktop, the researchers will explore the creation and evaluation of an architecture consisting of user interface agents, query processing agents, mediators, ontologies, and collection interface agents.
Although much of the research will be generic with respect to the information subject area, the testbed will focus on the subject domain of earth and space science. User communities for the testbed will include expert researchers, graduate, undergraduate, and high school students, and the general public. The research team will build a microcosm of content levels and media types, including page images, structured documents (SGML), interactive, compound documents and real-time interaction with real-time scientific data. Economic and intellectual property issues will also be considered in the design. Evaluation will be featured on a continuing basis.
Keywords: Agent architectures, Distributed systems, Information retrieval, Search algorithms
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