Software architectures for collaborative proxies in wide area information systems

With the fantastic development of network technologies (LAN, Intranet, Internet), information systems are every day more interconnected. However information system interconnection poses several issues: an evident issue is the necessity to use or develop a common representation of the target application: in this framework lie the works concerning ontologies, wrappers, brokers, collaborating query agents, etc. Another important issue is the performance of the global interconnected system: indeed interconnecting information systems increases the data servers load, the network load and may also cause query answer delays. Finally, and this may be the main key issue, too much information is no information: when the quantity of data becomes too important, users need help and tools to find their way in the information space. In this framework, we propose research directions based on collaborative proxy architectures to enhance the global efficiency of interconnected information systems (e.g., the WWW) distributed over a WAN, to provide users with adaptive search indexes and to build virtual communities