Categories and Subject Descriptors

Finding diagrams, chemical structures, maps or other journal article components is difficult because the articles typically are indexed by topic. Many of these components are all but invisible to standard keyword search. This research describes a method to extract component maps along with metadata from journal articles, and a way to index the maps to make them retrievable by category browse as well as keyword search. Proposed ranking of retrieved maps is by semantic relevance to the query as well as by map attributes such as scale or resolution. The method for extraction and indexing of maps with only minor adjustments should be generalizable to other sorts of article components.