APPARATUS FOR AND METHOD OF SELECTIVELY RETRIEVING INFORMATION AND ENABLING ITS SUBSEQUENT DISPLAY

摘要

A system (200) for reliably retrieving information which may be in any one of several possible formats (260) and for subsequent display of that information in any one of several possible formats. User-defined agents (240) are used to retrieve target data (220) based on a heuristic algorithm (230) and to store the target data in a canonical form, ready for republication in whatever form best suits a particular application. The system (200) is particularly well suited to obtaining information over the internet for display on a desktop system, but it is also well suited for applications having only limited display or computational capabilities (250).