Broker Building Tutorial
What is an Information Broker?
Definition
An Information Broker is a
kind of information agent that can autonomously search, gather and integrate information
on behalf of a user.
Example
Suppose you want to buy books from the
web. There are various websites that provide such services, notably www.amazon.com based in the United States and www.chaptersglobe.com based in Canada. Your
objective is to find a website that provides the best price for the books you want to buy.
You browse the two website that provides the best proce for the book you want to
buy. You can browse the two websites, search the prices of the books in each
website, and go to the currency converter service provided at www.xe.net/currency to convert the currence from USD
to CAD for each book. You realize that you have to shift back and fourth between
different websites and use a pencil and paper to draw up a matrix to do the comparisons.
There should be a better way
to do this. An information broker website will automatically collect information
form different places and find a suitable solution for you based on user-defined criteria.
In particular, the user specifies the criteria for selecting a commodity and the
broker presents a prioritized listing of products from different vendors.
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