Distributed data warehouses-the role of adaptive information agents

One of the greatest challenges facing the information age is the discovery of relevant information. Current approaches to the problem fall short in several respects. We propose a scalable, self-organising model for online distributed data warehouses. The prime feature of the model is a population of adaptive agents, one per Web site. These agents produce reports by distributing elements of a query to appropriate resources or to other agents in the population, Queries are couched in a specialised scripting language, based on XML. Agents adapt by converting new queries into functions and by recording new resources