Updating collection representations for federated search

To facilitate the search for relevant information across a set of online distributed collections, a federated information retrieval system typically represents each collection, centrally, by a set of vocabularies or sampled documents. Accurate retrieval is therefore related to how precise each representation reflects the underlying content stored in that collection. As collections evolve over time, collection representations should also be updated to reflect any change, however, a current solution has not yet been proposed. In this study we examine both the implications of out-of-date representation sets on retrieval accuracy, as well as proposing three different policies for managing necessary updates. Each policy is evaluated on a testbed of forty-four dynamic collections over an eight-week period. Our findings show that out-of-date representations significantly degrade performance overtime, however, adopting a suitable update policy can minimise this problem

A Web Smart Space Framework for Intelligent Search Engines

A web smart space is an intelligent environment which has additional capability of searching the information smartly and efficiently. New advancements like dynamic web contents generation has increased the size of web repositories. Among so many modern software analysis requirements, one is to search information from the given repository. But useful information extraction is a troublesome hitch due to the multi-lingual; base of the web data collection. The issue of semantic based information searching has become a standoff due to the inconsistencies and variations in the characteristics of the data. In the accomplished research, a web smart space framework has been proposed which introduces front end processing for a search engine to make the information retrieval process more intelligent and accurate. In orthodox searching anatomies, searching is performed only by using pattern matching technique and consequently a large number of irrelevant results are generated. The projected framework has insightful ability to improve this drawback and returns efficient outcomes. Designed framework gets text input from the user in the form complete question, understands the input and generates the meanings. Search engine searches on the basis of the information provided

Search Engines Giving You Garbage? Put A Corc In It, Implementing The Cooperative Online Resource Catalog

This paper presents an implementation strategy for adding Internet resources to a library online catalog using OCLC\u27s Cooperative Online Resource Catalog (CORC). Areas of consideration include deciding which electronic resources to include in the online catalog and how to select them. The value and importance of pathfinders in creating electronic bibliographies and the role of library staff in updating them is introduced. Using an electronic suggestion form as a means of Internet resource collection development is another innovative method of enriching library collections. Education and training for cataloging staff on Dublin Core elements is also needed. Attention should be paid to the needs of distance learners in providing access to Internet resources. The significance of evaluating the appropriateness of Internet resources for library collections is emphasized

Peer to Peer Information Retrieval: An Overview

Peer-to-peer technology is widely used for file sharing. In the past decade a number of prototype peer-to-peer information retrieval systems have been developed. Unfortunately, none of these have seen widespread real- world adoption and thus, in contrast with file sharing, information retrieval is still dominated by centralised solutions. In this paper we provide an overview of the key challenges for peer-to-peer information retrieval and the work done so far. We want to stimulate and inspire further research to overcome these challenges. This will open the door to the development and large-scale deployment of real-world peer-to-peer information retrieval systems that rival existing centralised client-server solutions in terms of scalability, performance, user satisfaction and freedom

Lightweight Federation of Non-Cooperating Digital Libraries

This dissertation studies the challenges and issues faced in federating heterogeneous digital libraries (DLs). The objective of this research is to demonstrate the feasibility of interoperability among non-cooperating DLs by presenting a lightweight, data driven approach, or Data Centered Interoperability (DCI). We build a Lightweight Federated Digital Library (LFDL) system to provide federated search service for existing digital libraries with no prior coordination. We describe the motivation, architecture, design and implementation of the LFDL. We develop, deploy, and evaluate key services of the federation. The major difference to existing DL interoperability approaches is one where we do not insist on cooperation among DLs, that is, they do not have to change anything in their system or processes. The underlying approach is to have a dynamic federation where digital libraries can be added (removed) to the federation in real-time. This is made possible by describing the behavior of participating DLs in an XML-based language that the federation engine understands. The major contributions of this work are: (1) This dissertation addresses the interoperability issues among non-cooperating DLs and presents a practical and efficient approach toward providing federated search service for those DLs. The DL itself remains autonomous and does not need to change its structure, data format, protocol and other internal features when it is added to the federation. (2) The implementation of the LFDL is based on a lightweight, dynamic, data-centered and rule-driven architecture. To add a DL to the federation, all that is needed is observing a DL\u27s interaction with the user and storing the interaction specification in a human-readable and highly maintainable format. The federation engine provides the federated service based on the specification of a DL. A registration service allows dynamic DL registration, removal, or modification. No code needs to be rewritten or recompiled to add or change a DL. These notions are achieved by designing a new specification language in XML format and a powerful processing engine that enforces and implements the rules specified using the language. (3) In this thesis we explore an alternate approach where searches are distributed to participating DLs in real time. We have addressed the performance and reliability problems associated with other distributed search approaches. This is achieved by a locally maintained metadata repository extracted from DLs, as well as an efficient caching system based on the repository

Approaches to implement and evaluate aggregated search

La recherche d'information agrégée peut être vue comme un troisième paradigme de recherche d'information après la recherche d'information ordonnée (ranked retrieval) et la recherche d'information booléenne (boolean retrieval). Les deux paradigmes les plus explorés jusqu'à aujourd'hui retournent un ensemble ou une liste ordonnée de résultats. C'est à l'usager de parcourir ces ensembles/listes et d'en extraire l'information nécessaire qui peut se retrouver dans plusieurs documents. De manière alternative, la recherche d'information agrégée ne s'intéresse pas seulement à l'identification des granules (nuggets) d'information pertinents, mais aussi à l'assemblage d'une réponse agrégée contenant plusieurs éléments. Dans nos travaux, nous analysons les travaux liés à la recherche d'information agrégée selon un schéma général qui comprend 3 parties: dispatching de la requête, recherche de granules d'information et agrégation du résultat. Les approches existantes sont groupées autours de plusieurs perspectives générales telle que la recherche relationnelle, la recherche fédérée, la génération automatique de texte, etc. Ensuite, nous nous sommes focalisés sur deux pistes de recherche selon nous les plus prometteuses: (i) la recherche agrégée relationnelle et (ii) la recherche agrégée inter-verticale. * La recherche agrégée relationnelle s'intéresse aux relations entre les granules d'information pertinents qui servent à assembler la réponse agrégée. En particulier, nous nous sommes intéressés à trois types de requêtes notamment: requête attribut (ex. président de la France, PIB de l'Italie, maire de Glasgow, ...), requête instance (ex. France, Italie, Glasgow, Nokia e72, ...) et requête classe (pays, ville française, portable Nokia, ...). Pour ces requêtes qu'on appelle requêtes relationnelles nous avons proposés trois approches pour permettre la recherche de relations et l'assemblage des résultats. Nous avons d'abord mis l'accent sur la recherche d'attributs qui peut aider à répondre aux trois types de requêtes. Nous proposons une approche à large échelle capable de répondre à des nombreuses requêtes indépendamment de la classe d'appartenance. Cette approche permet l'extraction des attributs à partir des tables HTML en tenant compte de la qualité des tables et de la pertinence des attributs. Les différentes évaluations de performances effectuées prouvent son efficacité qui dépasse les méthodes de l'état de l'art. Deuxièmement, nous avons traité l'agrégation des résultats composés d'instances et d'attributs. Ce problème est intéressant pour répondre à des requêtes de type classe avec une table contenant des instances (lignes) et des attributs (colonnes). Pour garantir la qualité du résultat, nous proposons des pondérations sur les instances et les attributs promouvant ainsi les plus représentatifs. Le troisième problème traité concerne les instances de la même classe (ex. France, Italie, Allemagne, ...). Nous proposons une approche capable d'identifier massivement ces instances en exploitant les listes HTML. Toutes les approches proposées fonctionnent à l'échelle Web et sont importantes et complémentaires pour la recherche agrégée relationnelle. Enfin, nous proposons 4 prototypes d'application de recherche agrégée relationnelle. Ces derniers peuvent répondre des types de requêtes différents avec des résultats relationnels. Plus précisément, ils recherchent et assemblent des attributs, des instances, mais aussi des passages et des images dans des résultats agrégés. Un exemple est la requête ``Nokia e72" dont la réponse sera composée d'attributs (ex. prix, poids, autonomie batterie, ...), de passages (ex. description, reviews, ...) et d'images. Les résultats sont encourageants et illustrent l'utilité de la recherche agrégée relationnelle. * La recherche agrégée inter-verticale s'appuie sur plusieurs moteurs de recherche dits verticaux tel que la recherche d'image, recherche vidéo, recherche Web traditionnelle, etc. Son but principal est d'assembler des résultats provenant de toutes ces sources dans une même interface pour répondre aux besoins des utilisateurs. Les moteurs de recherche majeurs et la communauté scientifique nous offrent déjà une série d'approches. Notre contribution consiste en une étude sur l'évaluation et les avantages de ce paradigme. Plus précisément, nous comparons 4 types d'études qui simulent des situations de recherche sur un total de 100 requêtes et 9 sources différentes. Avec cette étude, nous avons identifiés clairement des avantages de la recherche agrégée inter-verticale et nous avons pu déduire de nombreux enjeux sur son évaluation. En particulier, l'évaluation traditionnelle utilisée en RI, certes la moins rapide, reste la plus réaliste. Pour conclure, nous avons proposé des différents approches et études sur deux pistes prometteuses de recherche dans le cadre de la recherche d'information agrégée. D'une côté, nous avons traité trois problèmes importants de la recherche agrégée relationnelle qui ont porté à la construction de 4 prototypes d'application avec des résultats encourageants. De l'autre côté, nous avons mis en place 4 études sur l'intérêt et l'évaluation de la recherche agrégée inter-verticale qui ont permis d'identifier les enjeux d'évaluation et les avantages du paradigme. Comme suite à long terme de ce travail, nous pouvons envisager une recherche d'information qui intègre plus de granules relationnels et plus de multimédia.Aggregated search or aggregated retrieval can be seen as a third paradigm for information retrieval following the Boolean retrieval paradigm and the ranked retrieval paradigm. In the first two, we are returned respectively sets and ranked lists of search results. It is up to the time-poor user to scroll this set/list, scan within different documents and assemble his/her information need. Alternatively, aggregated search not only aims the identification of relevant information nuggets, but also the assembly of these nuggets into a coherent answer. In this work, we present at first an analysis of related work to aggregated search which is analyzed with a general framework composed of three steps: query dispatching, nugget retrieval and result aggregation. Existing work is listed aside different related domains such as relational search, federated search, question answering, natural language generation, etc. Within the possible research directions, we have then focused on two directions we believe promise the most namely: relational aggregated search and cross-vertical aggregated search. * Relational aggregated search targets relevant information, but also relations between relevant information nuggets which are to be used to assemble reasonably the final answer. In particular, there are three types of queries which would easily benefit from this paradigm: attribute queries (e.g. president of France, GDP of Italy, major of Glasgow, ...), instance queries (e.g. France, Italy, Glasgow, Nokia e72, ...) and class queries (countries, French cities, Nokia mobile phones, ...). We call these queries as relational queries and we tackle with three important problems concerning the information retrieval and aggregation for these types of queries. First, we propose an attribute retrieval approach after arguing that attribute retrieval is one of the crucial problems to be solved. Our approach relies on the HTML tables in the Web. It is capable to identify useful and relevant tables which are used to extract relevant attributes for whatever queries. The different experimental results show that our approach is effective, it can answer many queries with high coverage and it outperforms state of the art techniques. Second, we deal with result aggregation where we are given relevant instances and attributes for a given query. The problem is particularly interesting for class queries where the final answer will be a table with many instances and attributes. To guarantee the quality of the aggregated result, we propose the use of different weights on instances and attributes to promote the most representative and important ones. The third problem we deal with concerns instances of the same class (e.g. France, Germany, Italy ... are all instances of the same class). Here, we propose an approach that can massively extract instances of the same class from HTML lists in the Web. All proposed approaches are applicable at Web-scale and they can play an important role for relational aggregated search. Finally, we propose 4 different prototype applications for relational aggregated search. They can answer different types of queries with relevant and relational information. Precisely, we not only retrieve attributes and their values, but also passages and images which are assembled into a final focused answer. An example is the query ``Nokia e72" which will be answered with attributes (e.g. price, weight, battery life ...), passages (e.g. description, reviews ...) and images. Results are encouraging and they illustrate the utility of relational aggregated search. * The second research direction that we pursued concerns cross-vertical aggregated search, which consists of assembling results from different vertical search engines (e.g. image search, video search, traditional Web search, ...) into one single interface. Here, different approaches exist in both research and industry. Our contribution concerns mostly evaluation and the interest (advantages) of this paradigm. We propose 4 different studies which simulate different search situations. Each study is tested with 100 different queries and 9 vertical sources. Here, we could clearly identify new advantages of this paradigm and we could identify different issues with evaluation setups. In particular, we observe that traditional information retrieval evaluation is not the fastest but it remains the most realistic. To conclude, we propose different studies with respect to two promising research directions. On one hand, we deal with three important problems of relational aggregated search following with real prototype applications with encouraging results. On the other hand, we have investigated on the interest and evaluation of cross-vertical aggregated search. Here, we could clearly identify some of the advantages and evaluation issues. In a long term perspective, we foresee a possible combination of these two kinds of approaches to provide relational and cross-vertical information retrieval incorporating more focus, structure and multimedia in search results

From Hyperlinks to Hypercues : Entity-Based Affordances for Fluid Information Exploration

Peer reviewe

Distributed bookmark sharing primitives

Ankara : The Department of Computer Engineering and Information Science and the Institute of Engineering and Science of Bilkent Univ., 1999.Thesis (Master's) -- Bilkent University, 1999.Includes bibliographical references leaves 73-[74].İnce, KürşatM.S

Congenial Web Search : A Conceptual Framework for Personalized, Collaborative, and Social Peer-to-Peer Retrieval

Traditional information retrieval methods fail to address the fact that information consumption and production are social activities. Most Web search engines do not consider the social-cultural environment of users' information needs and the collaboration between users. This dissertation addresses a new search paradigm for Web information retrieval denoted as Congenial Web Search. It emphasizes personalization, collaboration, and socialization methods in order to improve effectiveness. The client-server architecture of Web search engines only allows the consumption of information. A peer-to-peer system architecture has been developed in this research to improve information seeking. Each user is involved in an interactive process to produce meta-information. Based on a personalization strategy on each peer, the user is supported to give explicit feedback for relevant documents. His information need is expressed by a query that is stored in a Peer Search Memory. On one hand, query-document associations are incorporated in a personalized ranking method for repeated information needs. The performance is shown in a known-item retrieval setting. On the other hand, explicit feedback of each user is useful to discover collaborative information needs. A new method for a controlled grouping of query terms, links, and users was developed to maintain Virtual Knowledge Communities. The quality of this grouping represents the effectiveness of grouped terms and links. Both strategies, personalization and collaboration, tackle the problem of a missing socialization among searchers. Finally, a concept for integrated information seeking was developed. This incorporates an integrated representation to improve effectiveness of information retrieval and information filtering. An integrated information retrieval process explores a virtual search network of Peer Search Memories in order to accomplish a reputation-based ranking. In addition, the community structure is considered by an integrated information filtering process. Both concepts have been evaluated and shown to have a better performance than traditional techniques. The methods presented in this dissertation offer the potential towards more transparency, and control of Web search