Federating diverse collections of scientific literature

Mischo²,

Cole

et al. 1999

Computer

Self Cite

51 Cover FeatureFederated Search of Scientific Literature T he Digital Libraries Initiative (DLI) project at the University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign (UIUC) was one of six sponsored by the NSF, DARPA, and NASA from 1994 through 1998. Our goal was to develop widely usable Web technology to effectively search technical documents on the Internet. We concentrated on building the experimental Illinois DLI Testbed with tens of thousands of full-text journal articles from physics, engineering, and computer science, and on making these articles available over the Internet before they are available in print.Our DLI Testbed used document structure to provide federated search across publisher collections, by merging diverse tags from multiple publishers into a single uniform collection. Our sociology research evaluated the usage of the DLI Testbed by more than a thousand UIUC faculty and students. Our technology research moved beyond document structure to document semantics, testing contextual indexing of document content on millions of documents. DLI TESTBED AND FEDERATED SEARCHThe DLI Testbed team designed, developed, and evaluated mechanisms to provide effective access to full-text physics and engineering journal articles within an Internet environment. The team, based in the Engineering Library at UIUC, had as its primary goals to• construct and test a multipublisher, full-text DLI Testbed that employs flexible search and rendering capabilities and offers rich links to internal and external resources, with the sources tagged in Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML); • integrate the DLI Testbed and other full-text repositories into the continuum of information resources offered to end users within the Engineering Library system; • determine the efficacy of full-text article searching compared to document surrogate searching and explore end-user full-text searching behavior, in order to identify user-searching needs; and • identify models for effective publishing and retrieval of full-text articles within an Internet environment and employ these models in the DLI Testbed design and development.

Section: Semantic Indexing and Technology Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

Federated search of scientific literature

Mischo²,

Cole

et al. 1999

Computer

Self Cite

“…The Interspace analysis environment seeks to unify disparate distributed information resources in one coherent model [26,25]. It provides a rich set of operations in support of complex interoperable applications.…”

Section: Overview Of the Interspace Research Projectmentioning

confidence: 99%

Automatic subject indexing using an associative neural network

Chung

Pottenger

Proceedings of the Third ACM Conference on Digital Libraries - DL '98

1998

The global growth in popularity of the World Wide Web has been enabled in part by the availability of browser based search tools which in turn have led to an increased demand for indexing techniques and technologies. As the amount of globally accessible information in community repositories grows, it is no longer cost-effective for such repositories to be indexed by professional indexers who have been trained to be consistent in subject assignment from controlled vocabulary lists. The era of amateur indexers is thus upon us, and the information infrastructure needs to provide support for such indexing if search of the Net is to produce useful results.

“…For example, the National Science Foundation (NSF)-Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA)-NASA Digital Library Initiative (DLI) is considered to be the flagship research effort of the federal NII program (35), and one of the DLI projects is concentrating specifically on scientific literature. The University of Illinois project is constructing a large-scale testbed with tens of thousands of documents from journals and magazines in science and engineering, in a production stream direct from major publishers, for thousands of users distributed around the Big Ten midwestern universities (36).…”

Section: Search On the Internetmentioning

confidence: 99%

Information Retrieval in Digital Libraries: Bringing Search to the Net

1997

Science

110

A digital library enables users to interact effectively with information distributed across a network. These network information systems support search and display of items from organized collections. In the historical evolution of digital libraries, the mechanisms for retrieval of scientific literature have been particularly important. Grand visions in 1960 led first to the development of text search, from bibliographic databases to full-text retrieval. Next, research prototypes catalyzed the rise of document search, from multimedia browsing across local-area networks to distributed search on the Internet. By 2010, the visions will be realized, with concept search enabling semantic retrieval across large collections.Immediate access to all scientific literature has long been a dream of scientists. The network information systems needed to support such access have steadily improved as the underlying computing and communications infrastructure has improved. The recent advent of World Wide Web searchers and digital libraries has rekindled popular interest in these issues. However, the problems and components have remained relatively unchanged since the early days of information retrieval. Thus, understanding the evolution of network search technology will place these systems in their proper historical context and aid in understanding their future.Organized collections of scientific materials are traditionally called "libraries," and the searchable online versions of these are called "digital libraries" (1). The primary purpose of digital libraries is to enable searching of electronic collections distributed across networks, rather than merely creating electronic repositories from digitized physical materials. Traditionally, information retrieval has been a task for professional librarians. Trained reference librarians interact with online services of specialized materials and report results to querying scientists. Although public computer networks have long been used to access specialized information services, it has taken the recent rise of the Internet to make literature searching directly available to widespread groups of scientists.Since the beginnings of online information retrieval more than 30 years ago, the base functionality has remained essentially unchanged. A collection of literature is maintained and indexed, which the user accesses by means of a terminal connected to a server across a network. The user specifies a query by a set of words, and all documents in the collection that contain those words are returned. The fundamental technology for searching large collections is finally changing, so that information retrieval in the next century will be far more semantic than syntactic, searching concepts rather than words (Fig. 1).Although the software has remained largely unchanged, the hardware has improved dramatically as computers and networks have become faster and cheaper. As a result, the ''document'' has changed from a citation with descriptive headers to the abstract to the complete multimedia co...