An Approach to Mobile Software Robots for the WWW

ÐThis paper describes a framework for developing mobile software robots by using the PLANET mobile object system, which is characterized by language-neutral layered architecture, the native code execution of mobile objects, and asynchronous object passing. We propose an approach to implementing mobile Web search robots that takes full advantage of these characteristics, and we base our discussion of its effectiveness on experiments conducted in the Internet environment. The results show that the PLANET approach to mobile Web search robots significantly reduces the amount of data transferred via the Internet and that it enables the robots to work more efficiently than the robots in the conventional stationary scheme whenever nontrivial amounts of HTML files are processed. Index TermsÐInternet, WWW, Web, mobile object, mobile agent, search robot, indexing robot.