Patent ID: 8126790

Claim:
A multi-agent system for automatically acquiring desired information from one or more information sources, the system comprising: an input device configured for inputting data indicative of a desired information; a processor communicatively coupled to the input device and configured to receive the input data; the processor comprising: a plurality of data provider filter agents associated with the one or more information sources and configured to search for the desired information within the respective information sources based on an assessment of the one or more information sources; wherein the assessment of the one or more information sources comprises: assessing at least one of a potential value of the desired information, a potential cost to acquire the desired information from the one or more information sources, or a combination thereof, and a probability of the desired information to be contained in each of the one or more information sources; and a content extraction agent configured to acquire a plurality of articles containing the desired information from the one or more information sources based on the search; an output device communicatively coupled to the processor and configured for outputting the plurality of articles containing the desired information.