Cooperative work for agent-based heterogeneous information integrated retrieval in digital libraries

Digital Libraries have emerged as an important research and application field, and been facilitated by advances in information technology, such as the World Wide Web. The scale and diversity of documents and information of Digital Libraries are immense, which are often stored with different formats. Therefore research in Digital Libraries has generally focused on transparent access to heterogeneous data sources. For the enormous, heterogeneous, dynamic characteristic of Digital Libraries resource, the integrated retrieval system framework of heterogeneous information in Digital Libraries was designed in the paper with the structure of wrapper and mediator. It includes user interface agent, wrapper agent. Mediator agent, knowledge retrieval agent and knowledge base search agent. The agents communicate each other and cooperate together to carry out integrated retrieval function of heterogeneous information in Digital libraries.