Information Aggregation In An Enterprise

In this chapter we discuss the application of a distributed information retrieval system in an enterprise environment. Focusing on the characteristics of information in enterprises such as the heterogeneity of available information, security policies, and the distributed nature of available data repositories we investigate how state-of-the-art distributed information retrieval approaches can be applied to build a distributed information retrieval system. Introducing a case study, we present an application of these techniques in an office environment that allows employees to find the most relevant documents across different data repositories without neglecting access rights. The application illustrates the advantages of using a multi-agent software infrastructure where individual components of such retrieval engine are realized by specific software agents.