Electronic Publishing 2000, Kaliningrad/Svetlogorsk

In this paper we examine a part of the Information Marketplace (Dertouzos, 1997) that will give users of the WWW a wide range of new possibilities for gathering information, a task that is predominantly carried out using index-based (e.g., www.google.com, www.metacrawler.com) or catalogue-based search engines like www.yahoo.com, for example. One of the major shortcomings of search engines is the lack of semantic certainty that results from both the absence of structure in the indexed documents as well as insufficient methods of information extraction and information retrieval regarding a generalized conceptual level (vs. the statistics-based word level that is still the most common method in search engine technology). For this reason, the user of a search engine is very often confronted with lots of documents that are beyond the scope of his or her search query.