Tendencies

What I learned nowadays (in a really abstract/general manner) :

Software agents paradigm is regarded as the future computing paradigm for software development. The frontrunners of this paradigm mainly argue to OOP and emphasize its lackness of expressibility on contemporary requirements. That is the current discussion. There is the notion of artifact in agent oriented computing which has its computational capabilities (internal and external behaviours). This notion opens so many ways of research/idea directions to be researched. So we (will) hear both "artifact" and the "context" more often in this field.

Information Retrieval
An important observation is the absence of foundation (founding theories, models etc.) in IR.

Nutch (as crawler, "the software bundle of Nutch already includes Lucene internally", and search engine interface) and Lucene (indexer). Nutch works with Tomcat. You crawl the (intranet) web sites with Nutch and index them for retrieval.

On the other hand, you can create your own customized search engine with Google (Google Customized Search Engine).


Next --> Trust Management

Stay tuned...