Multi-agent based architecture for querying disjoint data repositories

A digital repository is a digital archive for depositing and providing access to digital contents. It harvests metadata for providing an access framework of digital content to multiple users. In existing systems, query and retrieval is done on centralized basis and do not consider semantics of the query. Since the repositories are distributed, distinct and autonomous, there is a need for a framework which is capable of providing an efficient integrated and semantically enriched query retrieval mechanism over multiple repositories. We have proposed and implemented a multi-agent based framework for querying multiple disjoint repositories that is equipped with well defined semantic web technologies such as ontology [7, 8]. The system has been implemented using Jena framework for semantic web, Jade for agents and Java Swing for user interfaces.