Web services, Web searches, and cultural algorithms

Cultural algorithms, a form of evolutionary programming, employ a dual inheritance mechanism at population and knowledge levels to support problem solving, reasoning, and knowledge extraction. Domain knowledge is extracted and separated from individuals within a population and is placed in a belief space. Hierarchical structures employed in the belief space help to accelerate and guide population evolution. The structure of the cultural algorithm lends itself well to a data rich, but knowledge poor distributed environments. Current research, as reported in this paper, is directed toward implementing the belief and population space components as agents interacting with Web services, Web pages, and users. The cultural algorithm framework becomes a mechanism to evolve and refine meaningful search queries that extract significant and useful primary and peripheral information.