A collaborative approach to web information foraging based on multi-agent systems

Abstract

In this paper the task of Information Foraging (IF) is considered as a useful paradigm to address Exploratory Search. In the context of IF, a Web navigation strategy is introduced and formalized, and a multi-agent based model is proposed to exploit a collaborative approach to Information Foraging. A system based on this model has been developed, and its evaluations on the ACM and DBLP repositories are reported. Two datasets with different sizes were considered to show the effectiveness and the efficiency of the developed system. Furthermore, comparative evaluations were conducted in order to compare our approach with classical information access approaches. The results are promising and show the ability of the proposed Web Information Foraging system to find relevant Web pages in a very short time.