No abstract

Multi-agent systems have been successfully applied in information retrieval tasks, especially in environments whose sources of information are distributed and highly heterogeneous. They can be perceived as an alternative to face problems that traditional search engines are not able to solve yet. On the other hand, ontologies have shown their efficiency to management different sources of information. We present the model of some software agents that use ontologies to improve information retrieval tasks in a set of federated digital libraries. Gaia methodology is used for this purpose and the paper highlights some of its main advantages. It also shows that this methodology can be easily used in similar environments to avoid ad hoc construction of agent-based systems.