A Multiagent system for Navigation Assistance and Information Finding

Description/Abstract

A multiagent framework has been developed to address distributed multimedia information management. Our particular interest is information management within organisations, where information is a vital resource and locating the right information at the right time is a critical problem. Hence our focus is navigation assistance, and we are pursuing the idea that information acquired by one user navigating the information space is something that can be utilised to assist other users. The design of the system we present builds on the experiences of an earlier project which provided navigation assistance based on information about which documents other users had visited; our system has an improved architecture and extends the functionality, focusing on bookmarks instead of 'trails'. We have also integrated additional services including handling of multimedia documents and integration with other open hypermedia systems. The system is being evaluated within commercial organisations.