Multi-agent-based hybrid peer-to-peer system for distributed information retrieval

With the increasingly huge amount of data located in various databases and the need for users to access them, distributed information retrieval (DIR) has been at the core of the preoccupations of a number of researchers. Indeed, numerous DIR systems and architectures have been proposed including the broker-based architecture. Moreover, providing DIR with more flexibility and adaptability has led researchers thinking to build DIR with software agents. Thus, this research proposes a design and an implementation of a novel system based on the broker-based architecture and the peer-to-peer (P2P) network called broker-based P2P network. The proposed architecture is implemented with a multi-agent system (MAS) where the main agent playing the role of the broker, receives query from a peer agent and forwards them to other peer agents each with their index and resources. Upon completing retrieval process at each peer agent, results are directly sent to the peer agent that initiated the query without using the broker agent. Java Agent DEvelopment framework (JADE) is used to implement the agents and, for experiments, TERRIER (TERabyte RetRIEveR) is extended and used as the search engine to retrieve the Text Retrieval Conference (TREC) collections dataset notably TREC-6. The peer agent that originated the query progressively collects results coming from other peer agents, normalises and merges them and then proceeds with re-ranking. For normalisation, MinMax and Sum that are unsupervised normalisation methods are used.

An Islamic Distributed Information Retrieval Approach

The majority of Islamic and Muslim related search engines fail due to non-profit and content filtering issues due to explicit adult, hateful, and harmful content from Muslim perspectives are not addressed. While this is a crucial and noble initiative, it is controversial because it does not deal with all the needs of Muslim demography, including trustworthiness and aspects of life rather than Islam and religion. Custom search engines employ automatic REST API capability to provide results, and this can cause systemic engagement and compromises with their partners to search for and filter output results to cater customer needs. In reality though, this type of approach usually works with a small number of searches, it cannot be commercialized to serve a massive target audience of 1.8 billion Muslims around the world. To overcome this, the authors propose a novel information retrieval approach that uses homogeneous Islamic content available in distributed selective resources over the Internet to meet all Muslim needs. A difficult engagement algorithm is used to compromise highly relevant resources. Promising results were achieved with the proposed mutual approach.

Improving Results Aggregation Strategies in Distributed Information Retrieval

The top-ranked documents from various information sources that are merged together into a unified ranked list may cover the same piece of relevant information, and cannot satisfy different user needs. Result diversification(RD) solves this problem by diversifying results to cover more information needs. In recent times, RD has attracted much attention as a means of increasing user satisfaction in general purpose search engines. A myriad of approaches have been proposed in the related works for the diversification problem. However, no concrete study of search result diversification has been done in a Distributed Information Retrieval(DIR) setting. In this paper, we survey, classify and propose a theoretical framework that aims at improving diversification at the result merging phase of a DIR environment.

Distributed Information Retrieval: Developments and Strategies

Opposed to centralized search where Websites are crawled and indexed, Distributed Information Retrieval (DIR), also known as Federated Search, is a powerful way to comprehensively search multiple databases in real-time simultaneously. DIR is preferred to centralized search environments in a number of ways, characteristically among them are: 1. the diversity of resources that are made available; 2. improving scalability and reducing server load and network traffic; 3. the leverage of accessing the hidden or deep Web.There are three major phases/tasks of a DIR (i) resource description or collection representation (ii) resource selection and (iii) result merging. This paper aims at providing a comprehensive review on the various phases of DIR and also some current strategies being recommended in enhancing and improving the smooth implementation of a DIR system.