VIPAR: Advanced Information Agents discovering knowledge in an open and changing environment

Given the rapid evolution of information technology, most people on a daily basis are confronted by more information than they can reasonably process. The challenge to organize/classify and comprehend immense amounts of information is vitally important to the scientific, business, and defense/security communities (particularly when projecting the future evolution of information technology. For example, the defense/security community is faced with the daunting challenge of gathering and summarizing information so that military/political leaders can make informed decisions and recommendations. One such group, the Virtual Information Center (VIC) at US Pacific Command, gathers, analyzes, and summarizes information from Internet-based newspapers on a daily basis (largely a manual, time and resource intensive process). This paper discusses the VIPAR project 3 , which has addressed this need. Intelligent agent technology was chosen 1) to utilize the ability for broadcast as well as peer-to-peer communication among agents, 2) to follow rules outlined in an ontology, and 3) because of the ability for agents to suspend processing on one machine, move to another, and resume processing (persistence). These strengths are well suited to addressing the challenges of automatically gathering Internet-based information. The VIPAR system is a multi-agent system that demonstrates the ability to self-organize newspaper articles in a manner comparable to humans. The VIPAR system demonstrates the important ability where agents use a flexible RDF ontology to monitor/manage Internet-based newspaper information. Moreover, VIPAR extends this capability by dynamically adding/clustering new information entering the system. The VIPAR system includes thirteen information agents that manage thirteen different newspaper sites. Results from the project show that VIPAR can organize information in a way comparable to human organized information and validates the agent approach taken.