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The Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS) of the American Chemical Society (ACS) celebrated its centenary looking back proudly on its 100 years of existence.

The advantages and disadvantages of using cooperative databases are discussed.

In a distributed document database system, a query is processed by passing it to a set of individual collections and collating the responses. For a system with many such collections, it is attractive to first identify a small subset of collections as likely to hold documents of interest before interrogating only this small subset in more detail. A method for choosing collections that has been widely investigated is the use of a selection index, which captures broad information about each collection and its documents. In this paper, we re-evaluate several techniques for collection selection. We have constructed new sets of test data that reflect one way in which distributed collections would be used in practice, in contrast to the more artificial division into collections reported in much previous work. Using these managed collections, collection ranking based on document surrogates is more effective than techniques such as CORI that are based on collection lexicons. Moreover, these experiments demonstrate that conclusions drawn from artificial collections are of questionable validity. Keywords: Distributed document database; Collection selection; Meta-indexing; CORI

Interviews with Patrick Stone, chief executive of Fidelity National Information Solutions, and Parker Kennedy, president and director of The First American Corporation, provide an inside look at what the titans [...]

The collection fusion problem of image databases is concerned with retrieving relevant images by content based retrieval from image databases distributed on the Web. While there have been many studies about database selection and collection fusion for text databases, little research has been attempted for the case of image databases. Image databases on the Web have heterogeneous characteristics since they use different similarity measures and queries are processed depending on their own policies. Our previous study [Inf. Process. Lett. 75 (1-2) (2000) 35] provided three algorithms for this problem. In this paper, the metaserver selects image databases supporting similarity measures that are correlated with a global similarity measure, and then submits a query to them. And, we propose a new algorithm for this metaserver, which exploits a probabilistic technique using Bayesian estimation for a linear regression model. It outperforms the previous approach for diverse sizes of result sets for a query, and its improvement in effectiveness becomes especially large with small sizes of result sets. We also provide a virtual optimal algorithm to which our algorithm is compared. With extensive experiments we show the superiority of the Bayesian method over the others. Keywords: Collection fusion; Bayesian model; Similarity search; Image database

Because our schedules didn't mesh during the Online Information conference and exhibition the first week of December 2002, Judy Vezmar graciously invited me to LexisNexis Butterworths Tolley headquarters in Chancery [...]

This is an interview of Tammy Halstead, Chief Financial Officer of InfoSpace, Inc., on their company, their three businesses (wireline, wireless and merchant), their future growth.

At conferences and other speaking engagements, we often say we've never met a database whose performance we couldn't improve. We're willing to put that claim in print and share tips […]

If you have a sudden drop in DB2 performance, your customers know it, your internal users know it, your manager knows it, and they all make sure that you know […]

Database vendors compete for the best performance in benchmarks run by both application vendors and independent organizations such as the Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC). They carefully select hardware and […]

ONLY 2 YEARS AGO, I characterized electronic books as 'A New Publishing Revolution' (ONLINE, July/August 2000, pp. 14-28 and September/October 2000, pp. 18-36). In 2000, the e-book market was awash [...]

The operations and management of Worldspan LP of Atlanta, GA, are discussed in detail by president and CEO Paul J. Blackney. The company provides information and other services to the travel and leisure industries.

The operations and management of ImproveNet Inc of Redwood City, CA, are described in detail by president and CEO Ronald B. Cooper. The company provides information services concerning contractors to homeowners.

A new company spun off by Fidelity National Financial Inc. is touting the benefits of its desktop tools and database services for real estate and lending professionals. The management of [...]

Music information retrieval research is analyzed.

What decisions go into making a print product available online? For some, the development of a Web site is merely a 'me-too' approach to marketing, with the publisher saying, 'I […]

The operations and management of VCampus Corp of Reston, VA, are described in detail by president and CEO Daniel J. Neal. Education and training services are among the company's major businesses.

The operations and management of HyperFeed Technologies Inc of Chicago, IL, are described in detail by chairman and CEO Jim R. Porter. The company provides information services to the financial world.

The operations and management of Intelli-Check Inc of Woodbury, NY, are discussed in detail by chairman and CEO Frank Mandelbaum. The company provides document verification services.

The operations and management of Hoover's Inc of Austin, TX, are described in detail by executive chairman Patrick Spain. Hoover's provides content integration technology and information services to business.

The operations and management of Hotel Reservations Network Inc of Dallas, TX, are described in detail of chief financial officer Mel W. Robisnon. Hotel Reservations Network is a provider of discount hotel rooms.

Chemical Abstracts Service, located in Columbus OH, began producing its chemical databases in 1895. The service has produced about 30 million records including information from all over the world. A new tool called SciFinder 2000 was recently released.

The theoretical approach behind the InCommonSense system, which uses writing conventions on the Web, is described with discussion of the theoretical background for finding and reusing conventions in hypertext. Extending the system to improve existing hypertext systems and setting up new futuristic hypertext meanings is considered. InCommonSense theory is based on research findings from psychology, linguistics, sociology, and information retrieval.

An empirical evaluation has been applied to a proposed integrated environment for enhanced user interaction and addition of value to electronic documents. A 12-person focus group was used to identify features needed in future interactions. A review of developments in various user interface technologies, visualization and interactive techniques and consideration of new forms of information structuring and organization took place as well. Results have general implications for design of e-documents and for user interfaces.

Reflections on origins of the recent shift toward knowledge processing are offered with consideration of the highly interdisciplinary perspective and the primacy of the user in improving interaction with the system. Social context and technological advances are discussed. Knowledge production is discussed as a five-step process.

Tracking the literature of information science (IS) is discussed based on the history of Information Science Abstracts (ISA), the oldest abstracting and indexing (A&I) publication covering the IS field. A&I publications have a gatekeeping role in identifying changes in a discipline by tracking its literature. The history of attempts to define 'information science' is reviewed. The American Documentation Inst. changed its name to ASIS in 1970.

A personal view of the changing framework for information retrieval suggested by the World Wide Web environment is offered with speculation about how some changes may affect upcoming generations of the retrieval systems. Societal implications of the integration of trust are discussed. Web search engines and other information retrieval systems have standards built in, not understood by users, which amount to censorship/editing. Some ideas about the broader context of trust management infrastructure needed to support these developments are sketched. New research agendas that will be critical are pointed out. New collaboration will be needed between information scientists and others in various disciplines.

Retrospective and prospective views of information retrieval and artificial intelligence are presented. Topics include foreign language translation, searching full text, sending full texts, SDI profiling and clipping services, and information Nirvana or the World Brain.

Information retrieval based upon the amount of times that specific terms are used is applied to Spanish language documents.

Intelligent Information Retrieval is concerned with the application of intelligent techniques, like for example semantic networks, neural networks and inference nets to Information Retrieval. This field of research has seen a number of applications of Constrained Spreading Activation (CSA) techniques on domain knowledge networks. However, there has never been any application of these techniques to the World Wide Web. The Web is a very important information resource, but users find that looking for a relevant piece of information in the Web can be like 'looking for a needle in a haystack'. We were therefore motivated to design and develop a prototype system, WebSCSA (Web Search by CSA), that applied a CSA technique to retrieve information from the Web using an ostensive approach to querying similar to query-by-example. In this paper we describe the system and its underlying model. Furthermore, we report on an experiment carried out with human subjects to evaluate the effectiveness of WebSCSA. We tested whether WebSCSA improves retrieval of relevant information on top of Web search engines results and how well WebSCSA serves as an agent browser for the user. The results of the experiments are promising, and show that there is much potential for further research on the use of CSA techniques to search the Web.

The current study examines the effects of database assistance on clinical problem solving across three cohorts of students and two database interfaces. Medical students attempted to solve problems presented as clinical scenarios, first from their personal knowledge and then, on a second pass, assisted by one of two versions of a bacteriology database. One version had a form-filling interface in which each term was typed into the form; the other had a direct manipulation interface that allowed students to select terms with a mouse. Data were collected on three assessment occasions: just before the bacteriology course, just after the course, and six months after the course. Personal Knowledge Scores varied by occasion, being highest just after and lowest just before the course. The Database-Assisted Scores were similar just before and after the course, but were higher six months after the course. The differences between the interfaces did not have any statistically significant effect on database-assisted performance. There was a marginally significant interaction between interface style and assessment occasion, suggesting that performance with the direct manipulation interface was less affected by variation in the students' personal knowledge than performance with the form-filling interface.

Document classifiers can play an intermediate role in multilevel filtering systems. The effectiveness of a classifier that uses supervised learning was analyzed in terms of its accuracy and ultimately its influence on filtering. The analysis was conducted in two phases. In the first phase, a multilayer feed-forward neural network was trained to classify medical documents in the area of cell biology. The accuracy of the supervised classifier was established by comparing its performance with a baseline system that uses human classification information. A relatively high degree of accuracy was achieved by the supervised method, however, classification accuracy varied across classes. In the second phase, to clarify the impact of this performance on filtering, different types of user profiles were created by grouping subsets of classes based on their individual classification accuracy rates. Then, a filtering system with the neural network integrated into it was used to filter the medical documents and this performance was compared with the filtering results achieved using the baseline system. The performance of the system using the neural network classifier was generally satisfactory and, as expected, the filtering performance varied with regard to the accuracy rates of classes.

In many applications, information retrieval is a very important research field. In several key strategies, the binary trie is famous as a fast access method able to retrieve keys in order, so that the binary trie is often used as the indices of key search strategies such as trie hashing. However, the greater the number of the registered keys, the larger storage is required, as a result, the binary trie can not be stored into the main memory. In order to solve this problem, Jonge et al. proposed the method to represent the binary trie by a compact data structure, which is called the compact binary (CB) tree. The storage required for the CB tree is very small, to be sure, but it is debatable whether time and space efficiencies for CB tree can be improved. As for the time efficiency, searching and updating a key takes a lot of time in large key sets. This paper proposes a new hierarchical CB tree structure able to avoid the increase of the time-cost. As regards the space efficiency, in order to compress the binary trie into the CB tree, his method adopts the imaginary leaf, which is called a dummy leaf, for the nodes which have only one leaf. At this point, the number of dummy leaves has a bad influence on the space efficiency. This paper extends his tree representation for the Patricia binary trie and proposes the method for composing the CB tree without the dummy leaf. The theoretical and experimental results, using 50,000 Japanese nouns and 50,000 English words, show that this method provides faster access and more compact storage than the traditional method. Retrieval is 18-20 times, the insertion is 11-13 times and the deletion is 4-6 times faster. This method, moreover, is able to generate 25-40% smaller CB tree than the traditional method.