An embedded visual programming interface for intelligent information retrieval on the Web

The paper describes an embedded visual programming interface for intelligent information retrieval built on the top of the Web. The system is the integration of visual programming, the standard Web technologies, Java applets, inference engine, and database servers. It provides users with a visual programming interface and acts as a mediator to coordinate the message passing among the Web clients, inference engine, and database servers for the information retrieval. Through the Web client, a user can download all required Java classes, information, and the visual programming interface agent through the HTTP protocol, then activate the function of Java applets. The information retrieval is through the user's defined inference rules via the visual programming interface, distributed communication agent, and incorporation of inference agent. We use technical analysis for stock trading as one of many potential applications to illustrate our system.