Mobile Intelligence

6.2 MOBILE AGENTS AND DISTRIBUTED INFORMATION RETRIEVAL

Distributed information retrieval focuses on ways of locating and retrieving information of interests based on the user's specifications. As mentioned in Section 6.1, mobile agents take the computation to the data. Migration of the code as opposed to the data can highly improve the efficiency of the system in the presence of large sets of data that may not be relevant to the task at hand, a common occurrence in information retrieval systems. This section introduces the most recent work that has been conducted to improve distributed information retrieval through the use of mobile agents; Figure 6.1 depicts an abstract view of the environment. We further divide the section into two distinct parts; while the first one addresses distributed query processing and information retrieval, Section 6.2.2 focuses on the application of mobile agents in transaction management.

Figure 6.1 Mobile agents in traditional networking environment.

6.2.1 Distributed Query Processing and Information Retrieval

In general, information retrieval systems are concerned with not only the issue of improving the performance of searches but also that of improving the precision and recall of the results. Requests of users may be one-time or periodic. The use of agents to address such issues stems from the fact that agents execute independently from the system ...