Organizing the Internet

This paper examines XML and its relationships with SGML (Standardized General Markup Language) and HTML (HyperText Markup Language). It examines the importance of metatags and the XML Document Type Definition (DTD) and proposed alternatives. It looks at the differences between the two types of XML data: “valid” and “well-formed” documents

A document management methodology based on similarity contents

The advent of the WWW and distributed information systems have made it possible to share documents between different users and organisations. However, this has created many problems related to the security, accessibility, right and most importantly the consistency of documents. It is important that the people involved in the documents management process have access to the most up-to-date version of documents, retrieve the correct documents and should be able to update the documents repository in such a way that his or her document are known to others. In this paper we propose a method for organising, storing and retrieving documents based on similarity contents. The method uses techniques based on information retrieval, document indexation and term extraction and indexing. This methodology is developed for the E-Cognos project which aims at developing tools for the management and sharing of documents in the construction domain

The NASA Astrophysics Data System: Architecture

The powerful discovery capabilities available in the ADS bibliographic services are possible thanks to the design of a flexible search and retrieval system based on a relational database model. Bibliographic records are stored as a corpus of structured documents containing fielded data and metadata, while discipline-specific knowledge is segregated in a set of files independent of the bibliographic data itself. The creation and management of links to both internal and external resources associated with each bibliography in the database is made possible by representing them as a set of document properties and their attributes. To improve global access to the ADS data holdings, a number of mirror sites have been created by cloning the database contents and software on a variety of hardware and software platforms. The procedures used to create and manage the database and its mirrors have been written as a set of scripts that can be run in either an interactive or unsupervised fashion. The ADS can be accessed at http://adswww.harvard.eduComment: 25 pages, 8 figures, 3 table

Building a semantically annotated corpus of clinical texts

In this paper, we describe the construction of a semantically annotated corpus of clinical texts for use in the development and evaluation of systems for automatically extracting clinically significant information from the textual component of patient records. The paper details the sampling of textual material from a collection of 20,000 cancer patient records, the development of a semantic annotation scheme, the annotation methodology, the distribution of annotations in the final corpus, and the use of the corpus for development of an adaptive information extraction system. The resulting corpus is the most richly semantically annotated resource for clinical text processing built to date, whose value has been demonstrated through its use in developing an effective information extraction system. The detailed presentation of our corpus construction and annotation methodology will be of value to others seeking to build high-quality semantically annotated corpora in biomedical domains

Spatio-textual indexing for geographical search on the web

Many web documents refer to specific geographic localities and many people include geographic context in queries to web search engines. Standard web search engines treat the geographical terms in the same way as other terms. This can result in failure to find relevant documents that refer to the place of interest using alternative related names, such as those of included or nearby places. This can be overcome by associating text indexing with spatial indexing methods that exploit geo-tagging procedures to categorise documents with respect to geographic space. We describe three methods for spatio-textual indexing based on multiple spatially indexed text indexes, attaching spatial indexes to the document occurrences of a text index, and merging text index access results with results of access to a spatial index of documents. These schemes are compared experimentally with a conventional text index search engine, using a collection of geo-tagged web documents, and are shown to be able to compete in speed and storage performance with pure text indexing

StemNet: An Evolving Service for Knowledge Networking in the Life Sciences

Up until now, crucial life science information resources, whether bibliographic or factual databases, are isolated from each other. Moreover, semantic metadata intended to structure their contents is supplied in a manual form only. In the StemNet project we aim at developing a framework for semantic interoperability for these resources. This will facilitate the extraction of relevant information from textual sources and the generation of semantic metadata in a fully automatic manner. In this way, (from a computational perspective) unstructured life science documents are linked to structured biological fact databases, in particular to the identifiers of genes, proteins, etc. Thus, life scientists will be able to seamlessly access information from a homogeneous platform, despite the fact that the original information was unlinked and scattered over the whole variety of heterogeneous life science information resources and, therefore, almost inaccessible for integrated systematic search by academic, clinical, or industrial users