Agent-oriented Architecture for Task-based Information Search System

The topic of the reported research discusses an agent-oriented architecture of an educational information search system AIMS - a task-based learner support system. It is implemented within the context of 'Courseware Engineering' on-line course at the Faculty of Educational Science and Technology, University of Twente, The Netherlands. AIMS is endowed with an explicit conceptual mapping of the domain knowledge structures and the user model in order to provide user effective educational information support. It is focused on task-based search, supported by conceptual information structuring and visualisation and user modelling. The overall information retrieval process is split into several sub-processes that are distributed among team of information agents. The agents' behaviour is modelled according to the main activities involved in the process of task-based information retrieval. The system we describe is a knowledge-based course information support system whose main goal is to provide students and teachers with an intelligent help in respect to their preliminary defined curriculum tasks and goals. This way they are facilitated to handle efficiently the information within a specific subject domain. The students can use this system to perform and refine search queries for documents and to explore and navigate within the course domain structure. The teacher is facilitated with authoring environment for editing and construction of domain knowledge, course structure and documents database. We will present the general system . architecture of AIMS and will give a detailed description of all system modules.