A Distributed Weighted Proceedings JENC

This paper describes the WHERE system, an approach to a distributed indexing service for document search on the Internet based upon an architecture of centroids. Numerical data, produced with the aid of Information Retrieval techniques, in the form of a weighing measure, are added to the Whois++ centroids enabling ranked results to be delivered to clients, which they use not only for presenting them to the user as an ordered response to his query but also for a more eecient interaction with the directory mesh. The underlying retrieval engine is based upon the vector space model. The system provides for a reduced search space in the distributed index mesh, as compared to that of Whois++, as allowed by the mesh traversal algorithm employed.