Distributed visual reasoning for intelligent information retrieval on the Web

In this article, we describe a distributed visual reasoning system for intelligent information retrieval on the Web. The system is an integration of visual programming, the Web browser, Java applets, inference engine, and database servers. It provides users with a visual programming interface and acts as a mediator to coordinate messages passing among the Web clients, inference engine, and database servers for the information retrieval. A Web server is used to store the required Web page and to provide the required configuration functions for the system. Through the Web client a user can download all required Java classes, information, and the visual programming interface agent through the HTTP protocol, then activate the functions of Java applets. By composing visual sentences and providing parameters in the visual programming interface a user can extract the required information. A distributed communication model is proposed to give better communication speed and a more reliable connection. We use a financial diagnosis as one of many potential applications to illustrate our system. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.