Multi-agent Based Distributed Secure Information Retrieval

Enterprise search differs from Internet search in many ways. The overwhelming majority of information in an enterprise is unstructured. Together with information in relational and proprietary databases, these documents constitute the enterprise information ecosystem. The information in an enterprise is distributed. A centric search engine does not satisfy the security requirement in enterprise information retrieval. In this paper, a multi-agent based distributed secure information retrieval approach has been presented. In this approach, a department or a unit in an enterprise has a search agent, so, the department can keep their information privately and securely. A role based access control strategy is adapted for global security for an enterprise. We have developed a prototype system by this approach.