One of the primary goals of the project has been to develop (and implement with real databases) a search and retrieval system based on international standards that is capable of searching cross-domain resources held in multiple locations. This goal has been achieved, although even more resources and services have yet to be added to the system, and truly seamless integration of these services wi...

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 salien...

Trilogy is a collaborative project whose key aim is the development of an integrated virtual laboratory to support research training within each institution and collaborative projects between the partners. In this paper, the architecture and underpinning platform of the system is described with particular emphasis being placed on the structure and the integration of the distributed database. A ...

Electronic technology has begun to change what information is available and how that information is located and used. There are already a large number of electronic projects in the humanities (see Getty, 1994). These changes are first related to remote access: Instead of traveling to the sources of information, scholars use technology to bring information to them. One important consequence of r...

Resource discovery is more than just search: it is browsing, searching, selecting, assessing and evaluating, ie, ultimately accessing information. Giving users access to collections is one of the defining tasks of a library. For thousands of years the traditional methods of resource discovery have been facilitated by librarians: they create reference cards with meta-data that are put into catal...

In this paper we present a distributed discovery method allowing individual nodes to gather information about resources in a wide-area distributed system made up of autonomous systems linked together by a network technology substrate. We introduce an algorithm and a model for distributed awareness and a framework for dynamic assembly of agents monitoring neliwork resources. Whenever an agent ne...

Classical information retrieval (IR) is concerned with indexing a collection of documents and answering queries by returning a ranked list of relevant documents [10, 16, 18]. With the growth of the web, the problems of ambiguity, context sensitivity, synonymy and polysemy that are inherent in natural languages, together with the abundance of web pages related to prominent topics, have exacerbat...