Intelligent Caching: Selecting, Representing, And Reusing Data In An Information Server

Abstract

Accessing information sources to retrieve data requested by a user can be expensive, especially when dealing with distributed information sources. One way to reduce this cost is to cache the results of queries, or related classes of data. This paper presents an approach to caching and addresses the issues of which information to cache, how to describe what has been cached, and how to use the cached information to answer future queries. We consider these issues in the context of the SIMS information server, which is a system for retrieving information from multiple heterogeneous and distributed information sources. The design of this information server is ideal for representing and reusing cached information since each class of cached information is simply viewed as another information source that is available for answering future queries.