Mobile Software Agents for Information Retrieval in WWW-Databases

Current database technique offers the possibility to store giant amounts of data, worldwide networks provide the technical base for everybody to access it. However, it is usually very time-consuming or even impossible to find the most relevant information. This article describes the usage of mobile soft-ware agents to query different databases on the Internet, to rate and compress the results and to present them to the user in a consistent form, It contains a general definition of soft-ware agents, a detailed description of the approach and a discussion of its main advantages and weaknesses.