INTRODUCTION
The Internet is an increasing source of a great amount of information, where a lot of data can be retrieved from the Web
and there is a daily effort for updating and supporting it. The
way in which information is stored, visualized and shared is
changing due to the continuous generation of content. Unfortunately, despite the availability of specialized Web sites, the
registration, search and retrieval of useful information is still a
difficult task. In the academic world there are different types of
information that are continuously required, such as that related
to academic and scientific conferences and events, which is
needed in an accurate and up to date way.
This paper presents a multi-agent system (MAS) for automatic web search and retrieval of information of conferences
and their corresponding call for papers (CFP). The agents retrieve information about conferences, from different specialized conference Web sites, in which the information is structured in many formats; so an important task of the agents is to
extract and format the relevant information that appears in
them in order to concentrate it in a centralized storage system;
and visualize it through a flexible Web site with some search
options. Additionally, the MAS offers a Web service that provides information about the stored CFP in a standard XML
format, providing a certain degree of interoperability with other
systems. The MAS performs three main activities: a) searching
for information, b) collecting, formatting and storing information, and c) showing information to the user in a summarized way. The work presented in this paper is based on the
system architecture described in [1].
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section II
provides the preliminaries for this paper. In section III, we
describe three specialized Web sites that handle CFP, which are
used by our multi-agent system. Section IV presents the architecture of the multi-agent system, where the four agents of our
system are described. The different interfaces of our system are
presented in section V. Finally, section VI gives some conclusions and future work.