Trends in medical information retrieval on Internet

Information on the World Wide Web is unstructured, distributed, multimedia and multilingual. Many tools have been developed to help users search for useful information: subject hierarchies, general search engines, browsers and search assistants. Although helpful, they present serious limitations, mainly in terms of precision, multilingual indexing and distribution. In this paper, we cover some on-line solutions to medical information discovery and present our own approach, the MARVIN (multi-agent retrieval vagabond on information network) project, which tackles medical information research with specialized cooperative retrieval agents. We also draw some outlines for future extensions.