EUROgatherer - Personalised Information Gathering System
by Costantino Thanos
The explosive growth of Internet and the World Wide Web makes
an enormous amount of information widely available; however, this
abundance of information can easily become a mixed blessing without
methods to filter and control the potentially unlimited flux of
information from sources to their receiving end-users (the well-known
information overload syndrome). The EUROgatherer project aims
at alleviating this problem by making information available to
users in the appropriate form, amount and level of detail, and
at the right time.
The EUROgatherer project aims at designing and implementing a
system which provides a personalised information gathering service
on the Internet. In particular, the EUROgatherer system will provide
functionalities:
- to access a variety of information sources
- to create meaningful abstracts of the retrieved documents and
classify them appropriately
- to acquire and retain user profiles and act upon one or more goals
based on such profiles
- to support a relevance feedback mechanism.
A service-based architecture has been designed to meet the project
requirements and is now under development. The set of EUROgatherer
services (UserProfiling, Delivery, Pull, Push, and Wrapper services)
provided by the system are visible to the user and accessible
both separately or as a member of a cluster of services (for example,
Pull + Profiling + Delivery or Push +Profiling + Delivery, etc.).
One service can access another creating a cluster of interoperable
services. Thus, an Internet user can access a single EUROgatherer
service or a composite cluster of services. Such a cluster should
provide a more complete service (for example a personalized push
or pull service).
The openness of the architecture is guaranteed by the fact that
all the system components:
- share a common user profile model which complies with the standard
P3P (see the Profiling service below)
- share a common category taxonomy
- use standard communication mechanisms/protocols.
The EUROgatherer system is composed of the following services:
- User Service - the main entry point to the system services. It
provides the users with a global view of system functionality
and supports them when accessing the system components.
- Profiling Service - responsible for the management (storage, maintenance
and retrieval) of the user profiles.
- Dispatcher Service - responsible for dispatching information requests
to other system services.
- Delivery Service - responsible for delivering the results of
information requests to the users according to specified delivery
modes.
- Pull Service - responsible for collecting information meeting
user needs expressed both as long term needs (specified in a user
profile) as well as short term needs (ad hoc queries, results
on demand)
- Push Service - mainly responsible for filtering an information
flow with respect to user long term information needs.
- Wrapper Service - responsible for retrieving HTML pages by querying
online Web databases and search engines and transmitting them
to the Pull and Push services.
- Gatherer Service - responsible for retrieving HTML pages by spidering
the Web and transmitting them to the Pull and Push services.
- News Service - responsible for collecting continuous information
flows transmitted by News Agencies or Usenet news discussion groups
using several transmission means (satellite, internet, teletext,
videotext) and transmitting them to the Push service.
The project adopts an advanced federated approach to the Internet
services domain (see the figure). It will build on existing standards
and contribute to the development of new ones.
The users of the EUROgatherer system can be divided in two categories:
- Casual users - casual users are generic Internet users who use
the EUROgatherer system like any other Web search engine. They
have at their disposal the AdHocQuery functionality, provided
by the EUROgatherer User service, to issue queries to be executed
by the system. This functionality satisfies the short term information
needs of a user.
- Registered users - registered users are users who have specified
their long term information needs through the definition of a
profile. This profile is stored in a database managed by the Profiling
service. Retrieval of information specified in a user profile
in pull/push mode can be triggered either directly by the user
or by the dispatcher service on behalf of the user. Two interactive
modes are available: ‘Result on Demand’ and ‘Scheduled Queries’.
The EUROgatherer project is funded by the Telematics Information
Engineering programme. It is conducted by a consortium composed
of the following partners: Italia On Line, Italy; Xerox Research
Centre Europe, France; CINET, Spain; Eurospider Information Technology,
Switzerland; Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche - Istituto di
Elaborazione dell’Informazione, Italy; University of Dortmund,
Germany; Dublin City University, Ireland.
Please contact:
Costantino Thanos - IEI-CNR
EUROgatherer Project Coordinator
Tel: +39 050 593 492
E-mail: thanos@iei.pi.cnr.it
