Agents and Databases:A Symbiosis?
Authors
Heiko Schuldt
Type
In Proceedings
Date
2008/9
Appears in
Proceedings of the 12th International Workshop on Cooperative Information Agents (CIA 2008)
Location
Prague, Czech Republic
Publisher
Springer Berlin / Heidelberg
Abstract
Over the last decades, data and information management has been subject to significant changes. Access to data and information is no longer provided by monolithic database systems. Rather, applications need to cope with an increasing number of heterogeneous and distributed data and information sources, ranging from traditional databases, large document collections and information sources on the Internet and the Semantic Web. This also affects the way data and information is searched, accessed, and processed. In particular, the agent community has addressed this change and has spawned the field of information agents. An information agent pro-actively searches, retrieves, accesses and maybe even processes information on behalf of its user. Also the database community has faced the challenges stemming from this change by making database functionality available even outside of database systems. In this paper, we review the recent developments in both fields and show examples of activities which lead to synergies in both communities and which emphasize on the potential for symbiotic co-existence.
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