The InfoSleuth Project

The InfoSleuth Project at MCC [7, 9, 8, 1] is developing and deploying technologies for finding information in corp~ rate networks and in external networka, such as networks baaed on the emerging National Information Infrastructure. InfoSleuth is baaed on MCC’S previously developed Carnot technology [2, 6, 10], which was successfully used to integrate heterogeneous information resources. The Carnot project developed semantic modeling techniques that enable description of the information resources and pioneered the use of agents to provide interoperation among autonomous systems. The InfoSleuth Project investigates the use of Carnot technologies in a dynamically changing environment, such as the Internet, where there is no formal control of the registration of new information sources and the identities of the resources to be used may be unknown at the time the application is developed. InfoSleuth deploys semantic agents [9, 5, 3] that carry out coordinated searches and cooperate with each other to merge the retrieved data into understandable information. The project is developing technologies to support mediated interoperation of data and services over information networks in a dynamically changing environment, including: