A Digital Libraries System based on Multilevel Agents

Kamel Hamard 1 , JianYun Nie 1 ,
Gregor v. Bochmann 2 ,
Robert Godin 3 , Brigitte Kerherv 3 ,
T. Radhakrishnan 4 , Rajjan Shinghal 4 ,
James Turner 5 ,
Fadi Berouti 6 , F.P. Ferrie 6
1. Dept. IRO, Universit de Montral
2. SITE, University of Ottawa
3. Dept. Informatique, Univ. du Qubec  Montral
4. Dept. Of Computer science, Concordia University
5. Dept. de bibliothconomie et science dinformation,Universit de Montral
6. Center for Intelligent Machines, McGill University

Abstract
In this paper, we describe an agentbased architecture for digital library (DL) systems and its
implementation. This architecture is inspired from Harvest and UMDL, but several extensions
have been made. The most important extension concerns the building of multilevel indexing and
cataloguing. Search agents are either local or global. A global search agent interacts with other
agents of the system, and manages a set of local search agents. We extended the Z39.50 standard
in order to support the visual characteristics of images and we also integrated agents for
multilingual retrieval. This work shows that the agentbased architecture is flexible enough to
integrate various kinds of agents and services in a single system.

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