Cross-domain Resource Discovery: Integrated Discovery

The pursuit of knowledge by scholars, scientists, government agencies, and ordinary citizens requires that the seeker be familiar with the diverse information resources available. They must be able to identify those information resources that relate to the goals of their inquiry, and must have the knowledge and skills required to navigate those resources, once identified, and extract the salient data that are relevant to their inquiry. The widespread distribution of recorded knowledge across the emerging networked landscape is only the beginning of the problem. The reality is that the repositories of recorded knowledge are only a small part of an environment with a bewildering variety of search engines, metadata, and protocols of very different kinds and of varying degrees of completeness and incompatibility. The challenge is to not only to decide how to mix, match, and combine one or more search engines with one or more knowledge repositories for any given inquiry, but also to have detailed understanding of the endless complexities of largely incompatible metadata, transfer protocols, and so on. This report describes our progress in the 1 October 1999 – 30 September 2000 period on NSF/JISC award #IIS-9975164 in building an information access system that provides a new paradigm for information discovery and retrieval by exploiting the fundamental interconnections between diverse information resources including textual and bibliographic information, numerical databases, and geo-spatial information systems. This system is intended to provide an object-oriented architecture and framework for integrating knowledge and software capabilities for enhanced access to diverse distributed information resources.