Towards agent societies for information retrieval

Building decentralised information retrieval systems is one of the key challenges for the future Internet. These systems will most probably take the shape of open multiagent systems - societies of information agents that coordinate in a peer-to-peer fashion. In this paper we first analyse current IR methods so as to identify shortcomings in scalability and personalization of the information services. We then draw upon ideas from peer-to-peer technologies, to determine the requirements, and sketch the structure, of future societies of information agents.