Context-based Search in Topic-centered Digital Repositories

In this paper we address the issue of expressing and using contextual factors in information seeking tasks. Following our perception of context for the IR domain, we discuss the contextual support provided in TM4L an environment for building and using topic-centered learning repositories. We propose an extension of the Topic Maps model with contexts and an approach for contextual retrieval that improves the search of relevant resources. The implemented support based on this extension enables users to retrieve resources by specifying contextual factors derived from their current task or goal. An evaluation of the proposed approach based on the precision and recall is presented.