Höppner M. Bielefeld Academic Search Engine: a (Potential Information-)BASE for the Working Mathematician. In: Becker H, Stange K, Wegner B, eds. New developments in electronic publishing of mathematics. Joint proceedings of the ECM 4 satellite conference on electronic publishing at KTH, Stockholm, Sweden, June 25--27, 2004 and the special session on electronic publications at the joint AMS-SMM international meeting, Houston, TX, USA, May 13, 2004. Karlsruhe: FIZ Karlsruhe;  2004: 91-97.A modern search engine based approach to scientific information retrieval is described as the consequent next step after building up digital libraries. Bielefeld University Library has just established two demonstrators for possible retrieval services, one of them from mathematics

Becker, Hans

Höppner, Michael

Stange, Kari

Wegner, Bernd

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New Developments in Electronic PublishingAMS/SMM Special Session, Houston, May 2004ECM4 Satellite Conference, Stockholm, June 2004p. 91-97.Bielefeld Academic Search Engine:a (Potential Information-)BASE for theWorking MathematicianMichael Ho¨ppnerBielefeld University LibrarySummery. A modern search engine based approach to scientific information re-trieval is described as the consequent next step after building up digital libraries.Bielefeld University Library has just established two demonstrators for possibleretrieval services, one of them from mathematics.1. The customer’s point of viewServices of an university library do not end in itself, but the “general user”, i.e. the “cus-tomer”, is in the centre of interest. Customer’s demands can easily be described by– simple and easy search facilities– relevant and complete lists of results– direct and transparent access to all retrieved items,which can best be summarized as a “one-stop-shop” to meet the customer’s demand for infor-mation. While customer’s demands are legitimate and very easy to understand, customer’sown skills very often are poor and inappropriate: So in practice Google has become thefirst choice for information retrieval and seldom there is an awareness of the really relevantscientific sources and the reliability of retrieved items.Beyond traditional library services, the first step to keep the customer satisfied was build-ing up “digital libraries”, also called portals or subject gateways, which provide a simultane-ous search in different databases by a single user entry, i.e. a meta-search, provide availabilityinformation for each retrieved item and provide access to the shelves, the electronic full-texts,or document delivery services with respect to the libraries holdings or licensed materials. Infact, digital libraries integrate printed and electronic materials, monographic and journal-article information, local and remote holdings, so they are called hybrid libraries also. Awell-known example is the “Digital Library of North Rhine-Westphalia”, which started inc© 2005 FIZ Karlsruhe92 M. Ho¨ppner: Bielefeld Academic Search EngineJune 1999 and is now completely and transparently integrated in Bielefeld University Li-brary’s web-based information services.While digital libraries are milestones to better information services in principle, someobstacles emerge very soon. Performance often is very poor, due to the performance ofdifferent target systems, and stability problems occur for the same reason. With respect tothe content, digital libraries are restricted to databases and pay no attention to full-texts andweb-pages in general. Last but not least, digital libraries tend to be either too complicatedfor the customer or are completely neglected because often they are secondary offers besidesthe usual library’s information services only, contrary to the successful Bielefeld approach ofintegrated services.From the customer’s point of view, it is obvious that Google has become so successful.This search engine can be handled very easily, results are obtained in a split second and therelevance ranking seems to be reasonable in most cases, ignoring the fact that it is annoyingto drill down huge lists of results in the remaining cases. So, why Google should not bethe next step to better scientific information services? Obviously, a commercially drivensystem cannot guarantee long term accessibility, for commercial reasons indexing is doneautomatically without respect to different data types and structures, moreover relevanceranking of results is influenced by commercial interests, too. With respect to the relevanceand completeness of the provided content, Google and other commercial search engines focuson the visible web, i.e. neglect 90% of information available at the web, especially databasecontent.2. The BASE-service, still a demonstratorAlthough the objections against Google are serious, it is not true that search engines providesimple search facilities only, that search engines cannot handle structured, i.e. high-quality,data, and that search engines need a monolithic index structure which can be achieved atsignificant costs only. Modern search engines cope with heterogeneous data, i.e. with differenttypes and formats like full-texts, structured meta-data, images, and binary data, they provideadvanced navigation and browsing facilities like scientific taxonomies, thesauri, and cross-referencing, they offer flexible ranking and ordering schemes for list of results, and they canbe based on distributed and federated indices. One of the most advanced product is FastData Search (current version 4.0.2) by Fast Search & Transfer in Oslo, Norway, which hasproved its potential by being the platform for AllTheWeb, Scirus, FirstGov and lots of otherwell established web-sites. Furthermore, based on a cooperation with Prof. Guenthner’sCentrum fu¨r Informations- und Sprachverarbeitung in Munich, Germany, Fast is going toimplement linguistic tools like approximate search and cross language information retrievalwhich might even be used for an automatic extraction of meta-data.Bielefeld University Library has been a pioneer in electronic information services since itwas founded in 1967, so after developing– the first OPAC on CD-ROM in Germany together with one of the first CD-ROM-networks in 1988,– the document delivery service JASON together with the interdisciplinary journal-articledatabase JADE in 1993, see [1],M. Ho¨ppner: Bielefeld Academic Search Engine 93– the integrated library information system IBIS in 1997, see [2],– the Digital Library of North Rhine-Westphalia in 1999, see [5], which was transparentlyintegrated in the library’s service in 2000,– an “intelligent search assistant” based on fuzzy logic in 2003, see [3],it was quite reasonable to exploit modern search engine technology for further service im-provements. This is based on a cooperation agreement with Fast Search & Transfer.Since it would have been too ambitious to cover all subjects from the very beginning,Bielefeld University Library has restricted its BASE-activities, i.e. the Bielefeld AcademicSearch Engine activities, to two fields up to now: The first field is a set of “Digital Collec-tions” from various subject fields, most of them from the humanities including a core setof journals from the German age of enlightenment, actually retro-digitised by ourselves andindexed by the Go¨ttinger Akademie der Wissenschaften long time ago. The second field isa representative sample of electronic sources from “Mathematics”. This is reasonable be-cause mathematics is covered bibliographically very well and there are lots of “eic-projects”,i.e. electronic information and communication projects, including retro-digitising projects inthis field. Moreover, Bielefeld has been a former regional subject library for mathematics, andone of the first scholarly published open access e-journals, the “Documenta Mathematica”,is published in Bielefeld. Both applications are not a real service at the moment, but stilldemonstrators of modern search engine applications for scientific information retrieval. Bothare online since the beginning of this Conference on “New Developments in Electronic Pub-lishing of Mathematics” at http://base.ub.uni-bielefeld.de. Comments and criticismon both applications are invited.“BASE : Mathematics” covers lots of well-known content sources which can be found on theBASE pages and need not be introduced to a mathematical audience, see Picture 1.BASE comes along with a German and an English user interface and provides a simpleGoogle-like search line for basic search as well as an advanced search interface (see Picture 1)for different search terms. Search can be restricted to free (accessible) content sources,i.e. sources not only provided to certain users by license agreements, and can be furtherrestricted to specified sources. Search results can be refined by different aspects such asauthor, MSC-classes, document type, and language and search results can be improved by asimilarity search with respect to a single retrieved item, see:BASE search results are presented by their meta-data if there are any, or by a standardizeddescription. Full-texts can be accessed directly from the list of results by standard browserand plug-in facilities. The BASE interface can be customized for different purposes, up tonow there is a completely different experimental view prepared in the corporate design of theUniversity of Michigan’s Library.94 M. Ho¨ppner: Bielefeld Academic Search Engine Picture 1. BASE advanced search and content sources3. The BASE-architectureThe system-architecture is based on a client-server-structure, moreover there are differentfrontend and backend servers (see Picture 3) which both can be enhanced to multi-node-systems. While the client needs nothing more than a web-browser, the frontend server is astandard high-performance web-server (Bielefeld: 2 CPU Pentium III/800 MHz with 1 GBRAM at the moment, based on the usual LAMP-structure, i.e. SUSE-Linux 9.0, Apache 1.3,and PHP 4.3 with PostgreSQL instead of My-SQL at the moment) running PHP (with C++and JAVA-APIs as an alternative recommended by Fast), and the backend server shouldbe a high-performance multiprocessor system with fast hard disk arrays (Bielefeld: 2 CPUPentium IV/2.8 GHz, 270 GB RAID 5 at the moment, based on SUSE Linux 9.1, with LinuxRed Hat Enterprise as an alternative recommended by Fast) running Fast Data Search 4.0.2.The frontend server is used for providing the user interface, for processing the search results,and presenting the lists of results only. The frontend server communicates via http and aquery API with the backend server which is used not only for query and result processing withrespect to actual user-requests, but for crawling and harvesting data, for file traversing, forpre-processing data into an internal XML-format by Fast as well as for document processingand indexing, i.e. for building the system’s backbone, as shown in the following picture.Up to now, we have implemented http- and OAI-interfaces to databases from our well-understood meta-search environment as well as a bundle of SGML-interfaces for proprietaryformats from various sources. Further we have realized the appropriate database calls andprepared the retrieved items for Fast’s internal processing. Our index is based on the 15 well-known fields of the Dublin Core Meta-Data Set with 5 additional index fields, e.g. dcisb forM. Ho¨ppner: Bielefeld Academic Search Engine 95 Picture 2. Refinement of results Picture 3. BASE client-server-architectureISBN and ISSN, dcdoi for DOI or similar document identifiers, dcyear for processing a yearas an integer, dctype for data types like meta-data, full-texts etc., and dcrights for the namesof sources by copyright reasons.4. The vision of a serviceSo far, BASE uses basic tools of Fast Data Search only. Even this can be done more advancedin the future by extending the index structure and by including more different document anddata types. The quality of information retrieval can be improved further by using the moreadvanced features of Fast, some of them are under development. Besides intelligent user inter-faces, an integrated citation analysis, and improved, maybe personalized ranking-algorithms,the implementation of linguistic tools are on the agenda. This includes approximate searchand a cross-language information retrieval by the help of appropriate dictionaries. The qual-ity of the search facilities of BASE can be complemented by push services. Progress towards96 M. Ho¨ppner: Bielefeld Academic Search Engine Picture 4. Fast data search architecturemore advanced feature depends heavily on the consolidation of our current workflow by au-tomating more and more parts.Developing “BASE : Mathematics” to a real service for the mathematical community doesnot only depend on further exploitation and development of software tools, but on addingcontent, content, and even more content. This can be done by a cooperative approach, in factthis seems to be the only chance to reach the goal. So, one of our next interests is to buildup and test linking with external indices to realise federated searches. Moreover, BielefeldUniversity Library is interested to build up partnerships for the development of BASE withrespect to technical improvements and to the enrichment of content for making “BASE :Mathematics” not only a potential, but a real base for the working mathematician.A more detailed description of BASE, including motivation, technical aspects, and work-flow, is given in [4] and [6].References[1] Ho¨ppner, Michael: Zeitschriftenschnellbestell- und -liefersystem JASON-NRW. In: Mit-teilungen der Deutschen Mathematiker Vereinigung 1 (1995), 47–50.[2] Ho¨ppner, Michael: IBIS - ein internetbasiertes Informationssystem fu¨r Bibliotheken. In:Der Weg in die Informationsgesellschaft – Teil II /Martin Gro¨tschel. Mitteilungen derDeutschen Mathematiker Vereinigung 4 (1997), 46–47.[3] Homann, Ingo; Binder, Wolfgang: Ein Fuzzy-Rechercheassistent fu¨r BibliographischeDatenbanken. In: Informatik: Forschung und Entwicklung 19 (2004), 97–108.[4] Lossau, Norbert: Search Engine Technology and Digital Libraries: Libraries Need to Dis-cover the Academic Internet. In: D-Lib Magazine 10 (2004),http://www.dlib.org/dlib/june04/lossau/06lossau.html.M. Ho¨ppner: Bielefeld Academic Search Engine 97[5] Pieper, Dirk; Summann, Friedrich: Die Entwicklung des Zugangssystems der DigitalenBibliothek NRW. In: Nachrichten fu¨r Dokumentation 50 (1999), 397–405.[6] Summann, Friedrich; Lossau, Norbert: Search Engine Technology and Digital Libraries:Moving from Theory to Practice. In: D-Lib Magazine 10 (2004),http://www.dlib.org/dlib/september04/lossau/09lossau.html.Received December 30, 2004

Michael: IBIS - ein internetbasiertes Informationssystem f¨ ur Bibliotheken. In: Der Weg

Michael: Zeitschriftenschnellbestell- und -liefersystem JASON-NRW. In:

Norbert: Search Engine Technology and Digital Libraries: Moving from Theory to Practice. In:

Search Engine Technology and Digital Libraries: Libraries Need to Discover the Academic Internet. In:

Summann, Friedrich: Die Entwicklung des Zugangssystems der Digitalen Bibliothek NRW.

Wolfgang: Ein Fuzzy-Rechercheassistent f¨ ur Bibliographische Datenbanken. In: Informatik: Forschung und

Bielefeld Academic Search Engine: a (Potential Information-)BASE for the Working Mathematician

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Bielefeld Academic Search Engine: a (Potential Information-)BASE for the Working Mathematician

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