Abstract

The rapid advances in computer and communication technologies, and their merger, is leading to a global information market place. It will consist of federations of very large number of information systems that will cooperate to varying extents to support the users ' information needs. We propose an architecture which may facilitate meeting these needs. It consists of three main components: information providers, information brokers and information consumers. We also propose an approach to information brokering. We discuss two of it's tasks: inf ormation resource discovery, which identi es relevant information sources for a given query, andquery processing, which involves the generation of appropriate mapping from relevant but structurally heterogeneous objects. Query processing consists of information f ocusing and information correlation. While the access-based search, and syntactic and hierarchical information organization has been adequate in the past, information brokering in presence of huge digital libraries or millions of information sources will likely require semantics and

Citations