• Journal of KIISE:Software and Applications
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• v.29 no.1_2
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• pp.30-41
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• 2002

We focus on the mobile agents which are considered as new paradigm to solve information retrieval of large volumes of data in the distributed and heterogeneous environment. The mobile agent moves the computation to data instead of large volumes of data to computations. In this paper, we propose an information retrieval model, which can effectively search data in the distributed and heterogeneous environment, using mobile agents. Our model is applied to the design and implementation of an Q&A(Question and Answer) retrieval system. Our Q&A retrieval system, called QASSMA(Q&A Search System using Mobile Agents), uses mobile agents to retrieve articles from Q&A boards and newsgroups that exist in the heterogeneous and distributed environment. QASSMA has the following features and advantages. First, the mobile retrieval agent moves to the destination server to retrieve articles to reduce the retrieval time by eliminating data traffics from the server to the client host. Also it can reduce the traffic that was occurred in the centralized network system, and reduce the usage of resources by sending its agent and running in the destination host. Finally, the mobile retrieval agent of QASSMA can add and update dynamically the class file according to its retrieval environment, and support other retrieval manner. In this paper, we have shown that our Q&A retrieval system using mobile agents is more efficient than the retrieval system using static agents by our experiments.