As the number of electronic data collections available on the internet increases, so does the difficulty of finding the right collection for a given query. Often the first time user will be overwhelmed by the array of options available, and will waste time hunting through pages of collection names, followed by time reading results pages after doing an adhoc search. Automatic collection selectio...

Technical developments, such as the web of data and web data extraction, combined with policy developments such as those relating to open government or open science, are leading to the availability of increasing numbers of data sources. Indeed, given these physical sources, it is then also possible to create further virtual sources that integrate, aggregate or summarise the data from the origin...

The natural history domain is rich in information. For hundreds of years, biodiversity researchers have collected specimens and samples, and meticulously recorded the how, what, and where of these objects of research. To retrace this information, however, deep knowledge of the collection and patience is necessary. Whereas traditional access methods (e.g., analysing paper logs of specimen finds)...

We examine the impact of two types of information — document frequency (df) and collection term frequency (ctf) — on the effectiveness of database selection. We introduce a family of database selection algorithms based on this information, and compare their effectiveness to two existing database selection approaches, CORI [3] and gGlOSS [9]. We demonstrate that a simple selection algorithm that...

Entity search has emerged as an important research topic over the past years, but so far has only been addressed in a centralized setting. In this paper we present an attempt to solve the task of ad-hoc entity retrieval in a cooperative distributed environment. We propose a new collection ranking and selection method for entity search, called AENN. The key underlying idea is that a lean, name-b...

background: gender preference is prevalent in some communities and using medical techniques to choose the baby’s sex may cause the gender discrimination and gender imbalance in communities. therefore, evaluating the gender preferences and attitudes towards using sex selection technologies seems to be necessary. methods: this cross-sectional study was conducted in avicenna fertility center. part...

This paper describes our participation in the resource selection task of the Federated Web Search track at TREC 2013. We employ two general strategies, collection-centric and documentcentric, formulated in a language modeling framework. Results show that the document-centric approach delivers solid performance.

An efficient way to explore a large document collection (e.g., the search results returned by a search engine) is to subdivide it into clusters of relatively similar documents, to get a general view of the collection and select its parts of particular interest. A way of presenting the clusters to the user is selection of a document in each cluster. For different purposes this can be done in dif...