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 o f several possible formats (260) and for subsequent display of that informatio n in any one of several possible formats. User-defined agents (240) are used t o 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 for m 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).