Discusses recent European library and information science (LIS) events. Describes the development and use of regional and intra-European Union networks for science. Highlights three European conferences held in 1996: ACM-SIGIR on information retrieval held in Switzerland, Information Seeking in Context (ISIC) held in Finland, and Conceptions of…

Presents an overview of feedback within the cybernetics and social frameworks. These feedback concepts are then compared with the interactive feedback concept evolving within the framework of information seeking and retrieving, based on their conceptualization of the feedback loop and notion of information. (Author/AEF)

Explores business-related sites on the Russian Web and estimates usability for the Western user by focusing on the following: type of businesses; language on sites; communication capability; and response time of site servers. Findings suggest the Russian Web is more usable in terms of language and communication capability than ordering capability…

Applies a prefix trie index, or trie hashing, to the problem of providing fast search times, fast load times, and fast update properties in a bibliographic or full-text retrieval system with inverted files. Statistics are given for a test database consisting of an online catalog at the University of Western Ontario. (Author/LRW)

Discusses database interfaces and explains that collaboration is an important aspect of searching online information retrieval systems that requires explicit computerized support. Collaboration in physical and in digital libraries is discussed and an example of a system that supports collaboration between browsers, ARIADNE, is described. (105…

Analyzes relevance assessments of topical descriptors for bibliographic records for two dimensions: (1) a vertical conceptual hierarchy of broad to narrow descriptors, and (2) a horizontal linkage of related terms. The data were analyzed for a semantic distance and semantic direction effect as postulated by the Semantic Distance Model. (Author/LRW)

Examines strengths and weaknesses of organizational systems developed to organize and access electronic resources available via the Internet. Highlights include library online catalogs; cataloging rules and MARC records; text encoding initiative (TEI) headers; the Internet union catalog; browsing lists; robot-generated indexes; a core data set of…

Explores context in information seeking as equivalent to the situation in which a process is immersed. Discusses contingency approaches that detail active ingredients of the situation that have specific, predictable effects. Examines major frameworks for meaning systems. Discusses how a deeper appreciation of context can enhance understanding of…

Presents a literature review that covers the following topics related to data mining (DM) in health and medical information: the potential of DM in health and medicine; statistical methods; evaluation of methods; DM tools for health and medicine; inductive learning of symbolic rules; application of DM tools in diagnosis and prognosis; and…

In this interview Professor Stuart Sutton discusses proliferation of metadata schemas as an outgrowth of various discourse communities as they find their niche on the semantic Web. Highlights include interoperability; cataloging tools, including GEMCat; and the role of librarians and information science education in the development of Internet…

Discussion of ranking systems used in various settings, including college football and academic admissions, focuses on the Google search engine. Explains the PageRank mathematical formula that scores Web pages by connecting the number of links; limitations, including authenticity and accuracy of ranked Web pages; relevancy; adjusting algorithms;…

Discussion of information overload from the Internet focuses on an information push-delivery system, which applies fuzzy information retrieval and fuzzy similarity measurement to avoid the information overload problem. Describes an empirical investigation conducted with students at Da-Yeh University (Taiwan) that investigated satisfaction with a…

Discussion of MEDLINE document indexing focuses on a study that assessed the use of free text, Medical Subject Headings (MeSH), and a variety of combination retrieval strategies. Prior research involving free text and controlled vocabularies is reviewed, and results of the study indicate that MeSH does have an important role in text retrieval.…

Discusses access methods in hypermedia and information retrieval and describes a research project in which similarity measures have been extended to include imprecise matching over different dimensions of structured classification schemes. The semantic similarity of information units forms the basis for the automatic construction of links and is…

Discusses the growth in the availability of information on the Web in languages other than English and focuses on cross-lingual semantic interoperability. Describes the development of an automatic English/Chinese thesaurus and reports results of an experiment with legal information from the Hong Kong government, including precision and recall.…