Suggests an alternative document representation method based on "exemplary documents," those that describe or exhibit the intellectual structure of a particular field of interest. Exemplary documents provide both an indexing vocabulary for that area and a narrative context in which the indexing terms have a clearer meaning. It is much…

Suggests that preliminary findings from research on intellectual access to digital images indicate a need for improved browsing tools, image manipulation software, feedback mechanisms, and query analysis. Discusses problems of image retrieval identified in current research, reports on an evaluation project in process, and proposes a framework for…

Finding information on the Web without encountering numerous false positives poses a challenge to multimedia information retrieval systems (MMIR). This research focuses on improving precision and recall in an MMIR system by interactively combining text processing with image processing in both the indexing and retrieval phases. A picture search…

Presents an overview of the ways in which user/system interaction in interactive information-retrieval (IR) systems has been treated in IR research and practice over the years. Describes the characteristics of a number of IR systems, as well as proposals for IR systems, in light of challenges set for by John Bennett in 1971. Contains 82…

Knowledge discovery in databases (KDD) revolves around the investigation and creation of knowledge, processes, algorithms, and mechanisms for retrieving knowledge from data collections. The article is an introductory overview of KDD. The rationale and environment of its development and applications are discussed. Issues related to database design…

Addresses the problem of how to find interesting but previously unknown implicit information within the scientific literature. The use of software, called Arrowsmith, that can create suggestive juxtapositions of Medline records to help biomedical researchers detect new and useful relationships, is described. Contains 34 references. (Author/MES)

Argues that providing end users with more information does not really address their problems and, in fact, does not even identify them. Topics discussed include the growth of information technology, reasons for the decline in the number of reference librarians, roles of libraries, and the importance of information intermediaries. (MES)

Presents results of research into the best of the academic subject directories, based on three general category searches--one historical, one in literature, and one in the field of science. Describes the 11 winning selections in three divided groups: winners, runners-up, and third-place contenders. (AEF)

Expert users of the Internet were studied to identify the strategies they used to locate specific information. Participants' searching actions were recorded, including counts of each movement from Web page to Web page and within Web pages. Three patterns appeared: keyword searching, hierarchical searching, and meandering. Implications for the…

Explores the information processes and work situations of interdisciplinary scientists, focusing on structural and strategic elements of information exchange between intellectual domains. Interview data reveal that scientists undertake individual and cooperative boundary-crossing research. Four research modes are identified and associated with…

Discusses a multidisciplinary workshop that addressed issues concerning internationally distributed information networks. Highlights include multilingual information access in media other than character-coded text; cross-language information retrieval and multilingual metadata; and evaluation of multilingual systems. (LRW)

Explores the utility of using prior domain knowledge (in the form of taxonomies over attributes, attribute values and concept classes) to constrain the rule learner's search by requiring it to be consistent with what is already known about the domain. Spreading Activation Learning (SAL) is used to efficiently learn over taxonomically structured…

Shape Recovery Analysis (SHERA), a new visual analytical technique, is applied to the N-Gram hypothesis on matched Japanese-English technical documents. Results reveal compaction in the translation of Japanese subject terms to English subject terms. The biagram approach to the Japanese data yields a remarkable similarity to the matching visualized…

"MedLine Search Assistant" is a new interface for MEDLINE searching that improves both search precision and recall by helping the user convert a free text search to a controlled vocabulary-based search in a visual environment. Features of the interface are described, followed by details of the conceptual design and the physical design of…

Reviews the characteristics of the Cheshire II system that is being used to implement full-text and fielded searching of bibliographic information for the University of California Berkeley Digital Library Initiative. Examines its performance when applied to a collection of large full-text documents in the TREC Interactive Retrieval Track and its…