Smart spaces, or smart environments, represent the next evolutionary development in buildings, banking, homes, hospitals, transportation systems, industries, cities, and government automation. By riding the tide of sensor and event processing technologies, the smart environment captures and processes information about its surroundings as well as…

ONE OF THE PROBLEMS IN INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL SYSTEMS OF TECHNICAL DOCUMENTS IS THE INTERPRETATION OF WORDS USED TO INDEX DOCUMENTS. SEMANTIC TOOLS, DEFINED AS CHANNELS FOR THE COMMUNICATION OF WORD MEANINGS BETWEEN TECHNICAL EXPERTS, DOCUMENT INDEXERS, AND SEARCHERS, PROVIDE ONE METHOD OF DEALING WITH THE PROBLEM OF MULTIPLE…

This report discusses the problem of the meansings of words used in information retrieval systems, and shows how semantic tools can aid in the communication which takes place between indexers and searchers via index terms. After treating the differing use of semantic tools in different types of systems, two tools (classification tables and…

This investigation matches the emerging techniques in computerized natural language processing against emerging needs for such techniques in the information field to evaluate and extend such techniques for future applications and to establish a basis and direction for further research toward these goals. An overview describes developments in the…

Examines the vocabulary and communication constructs that are used by novices and domain experts to describe objects in an object identification task. Results suggest that indexing and retrieval systems should provide semantic level similarity mechanisms to allow for whole-object as well as part-wise visual analogy. The systems should also provide…

Describes a system developed for the automatic recognition of biological concepts in titles of scientific articles; reports results of several pilot experiments which tested the system's performance; analyzes typical ambiguity problems encountered by the system; describes a disambiguation technique that was developed; and discusses future plans…

This paper presents an information agent and latent semantic-based indexing architecture to retrieve documents on the Internet. The system optimizes the search for documents in the Internet by automatically retrieving relevant links. The information used for the search can be obtained, for instance, from Internet browser caches and from grades of…