Strategies for cooperative search in distributed databases

We consider the problem of searching a set of data repositories, each managed by an independent agent which is able to handle queries from users, as well as queries from peer agents. Given a query, an agent's task is to find a closest match to the query over all the distributed databases. The agents search the distributed databases cooperatively by routing queries with each other. However, it is inefficient to route all queries to all agents. In this paper, we present strategies for routing queries efficiently between agents.