Publication - BIG: An Agent for Resource-Bounded Information Gathering and Decision Making

Authors: Lesser, Victor; Horling, Bryan; Klassner, Frank; Raja, Anita; Wagner, Thomas; and Zhang, Shelley
Title: BIG: An Agent for Resource-Bounded Information Gathering and Decision Making
Abstract: The World Wide Web has become an invaluable information resource but the explosion of available information has made web search a time consuming and complex process. The large number of information sources and their different levels of accessibility, reliability and associated costs present a complex information gathering coordination problem. This paper describes the rationale, architecture, and implementation of a next generation information gathering system – a system that integrates several areas of Artificial Intelligence research under a single umbrella. Our solution to the information explosion is an information gathering agent, BIG, that plans to gather information to support a decision process, reasons about the resource trade-offs of different possible gathering approaches, extracts information from both unstructured and structured documents, and uses the extracted information to refine its search and processing activities.
Keywords: BIG
Publication: Artificial Intelligence Journal, Special Issue on Internet Information Agents, Vol: 118, Num: 1-2, pp. 197 - 244
Publisher: Elsevier Science
Date: May 2000
Sources: PS: ftp://ftp.cs.umass.edu/pub/techrept/techreport/1998/UM-CS-1998-052.ps
PDF: /Documents/UM-CS-1998-052.pdf
Notes: Also available as UMass Computer Science Technical Report 1998-52
Reference: Lesser, Victor; Horling, Bryan; Klassner, Frank; Raja, Anita; Wagner, Thomas; and Zhang, Shelley. BIG: An Agent for Resource-Bounded Information Gathering and Decision Making. Artificial Intelligence Journal, Special Issue on Internet Information Agents, Volume 118, Number 1-2, Elsevier Science, pp. 197-244. May 2000. Also available as UMass Computer Science Technical Report 1998-52
bibtex: 
@article{Lesser-122,
  author    = "Victor Lesser and Bryan Horling and Frank Klassner
               and Anita Raja and Thomas Wagner and Shelley Zhang",
  title     = "{BIG: An Agent for Resource-Bounded Information
               Gathering and Decision Making}",
  journal   = "Artificial Intelligence Journal, Special Issue on
               Internet Information Agents",
  volume    = "118",
  number    = "1-2",
  publisher = "Elsevier Science",
  pages     = "197-244",
  month     = "May",
  year      = "2000",
  url       = "http://mas.cs.umass.edu/paper/122",
}