AGATHE: An Agent- and Ontology-Based System for Gathering Information about Restricted Web Domains

Due to Web size and diversity of information, relevant information gathering on the Web turns out to be a highly complex task. The main problem with most information retrieval approaches is neglecting pages’ context, given their inner deficiency: search engines are based on keyword indexing which cannot capture context. Considering restricted domains, taking into account contexts may lead to more relevant and accurate information gathering. In the last years, we have conducted research with this hypothesis, and proposed an agent- and ontology-based restricted-domain cooperative information gathering approach accordingly, that permit the development of specific information gathering systems. In this article, we present this novel approach based on these guiding ideas, and a generic software architecture, named AGATHE, which is a full-fledged scalable multi-agent system.