Distributed resource discovery and structured data searching with Chesire II

ABSTRACT

This demonstration will show describe the construction and application of Cross-Domain Information Servers using features of the standard Z39.50 information retrieval protocol[Z39.50]. The system is currently being used to build and search distributed indexes for databases with disparate structured data (SGML and XML). We use the Z39.50 Explain Database to determine the databases and indexes of a given server, then use the Z39.50 SCAN facility to extract the contents of the indexes. This information is used to build collection documents that can be retrieved using probabilistic retrieval algorithms.

REFERENCES

• 1: James C. French , Allison L. Powell , Charles L. Viles , Travis Emmitt , Kevin J. Prey, Evaluating database selection techniques: a testbed and experiment, Proceedings of the 21st annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval, p.121-129, August 24-28, 1998, Melbourne, Australia [doi>10.1145/290941.290976]
• 2: Larson, R. R. and Carson, C. Information Access for A Digital Library: Cheshire II and the Berkeley Environmental Digital Library. In Proceedings ASIS '99 (Washington, DC, 1999), Information Today, 515-535.
• 3: Jinxi Xu , Jamie Callan, Effective retrieval with distributed collections, Proceedings of the 21st annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval, p.112-120, August 24-28, 1998, Melbourne, Australia [doi>10.1145/290941.290974]
• 4: Z39.50 Maintenance Agency. Information Retrieval (Z39.50): Application Service Definition and Protocol Specification (ANSI/NISO Z39.50-1995), Washington: Library of Congress, 1995

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.3 INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL
      H.3.1 Content Analysis and Indexing
          Subjects: Indexing methods

Additional Classification:
  F. Theory of Computation
  F.1 COMPUTATION BY ABSTRACT DEVICES
      F.1.2 Modes of Computation
          Subjects: Probabilistic computation

  H. Information Systems
  H.3 INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL
      H.3.3 Information Search and Retrieval
          Subjects: Search process

General Terms:
Design, Experimentation, Performance

Keywords:
cross-domain resource discovery, distributed information retrieval, distributed search