QUEST - Querying Specialized Collections on the Web

Ensuring access to specialized web-collections in a fast evolving web environment requires flexible techniques for orientation and querying. The adoption of meta search techniques for web-collections is hindered by the enormous heterogeneity of the resources. In this paper we introduce QUEST — a system for querying specialized collections on the web. One focus of QUEST is to unify search fields from different collections by relating the search concepts to each other in a concept-taxonomy. To identify the most relevant collections according to a user query, we propose an association-based strategy. Furthermore the Frankurt Core is introduced — a metadata-scheme for describing web-collections as a whole. Its fields are filled automatically by a metadata-collector component. Finally a prototype of QUEST is presented, demonstrating the integration of the techniques in an overall architecture.