Bee hive at work: Following a developing story on the web

Abstract

Problem solving methods, inspired biologically or by nature, are gaining in importance. Their potential for devising new, but also for increasing efficiency of some well-known methods for solving different kinds of problems, is becoming more and more obvious. The behaviour of social insects provides a lot of inspiration. We took inspiration from honey bees, in particular the way they behave in a hive. We proposed a modified model devised for searching parts of the web online. In a series of experiments, we attempted to follow a developing story with the aim to automatically find documents (web pages) bringing news on the story. This service, working as a beehive, delivered documents as expected. © 2010 IFIP.