Abstract

Autonomous agents for topic driven retrieval of information from the Web are currently a very active area of research. The ability to conduct real time searches for information is important for many users including biomedical scientists, health care professionals and the general public. We present preliminary research on different retrieval agents tested on their ability to retrieve biomedical information, whose relevance is assessed using both genetic and ontological expertise. In particular, the agents are judged on their performance in fetching information about diseases when given information about genes. We discuss several key insights into the particular challenges of agent based retrieval learned from our initial experience in the biomedical domain.

Citations