A multiagent framework for querying distributed digital collections

Abstract

Since initial digitization strategies are often inspired by existing usage of the data, and usage of archives often varies among institutes, there is a lot of variation in accessibility of digital collections. We identify four challenges that researchers may encounter when querying such collections in conjunction for research purposes, namely query formulation, alignment, source selection and lack of transparency. We present a multiagent architecture to help overcome these challenges and discuss an prototype implementation of this framework. By means of a query scenario we show the utility of using the framework for humanities researchers.