4.12 Agents Tools

4.12 Agents Tools

Agent software is readily available from various sources, including the Web, from such sites as agentland.com (see Figure 4.3).

Figure 4.3: Agentland.com provides agent software for downloading.

Agents that perform different functions can also be downloaded from agentland (see Figure 4.4). There are information retrieval agents, monitoring agents, and development kits for constructing agents.

Figure 4.4: A menu of development agent software available.

To illustrate how some of these agents work, we will use InfoGIST, an information retrieval agent to search and aggregate a set of Web pages on the basis of keywords we provide: the search will be for "investigative data mining." The agent is instructed to retrieve all pages with all of these words in them and to prioritize them in a list (see Figure 4.5).

Figure 4.5: The completed agent form.

Figure 4.6 shows the results of the agent's search.

Figure 4.6: A list is generated with scores of relevance associated with them.

Using an agent, as opposed to a search engine, has the advantage that all of these links can be viewed at any time. The links are also scored for relevance. This particular agent also assigns a grade to each item it retrieves, with the most relevant earning an A. Portions of the documents are shown on the right screen, with links and the search engine used presented in the upper right window. Analysts can use agents routinely to search for relationships between new data, update old data, perform specific calculations, etc.