Presents the results of an investigation of the use of links on Web pages; a content analysis was performed on 75 Web pages and their links. Results will provide a conceptual framework in which Web page design can be considered, including issues of authoring, retrieval, and built-in and on-the-fly guidance for reading and browsing. (Author/AEF)

In 1996, the Commission of the European Union Information Technologies Program funded a three-year working group, Mira, to discuss and advance research in the area of evaluation frameworks for interactive and multimedia. This article presents the author's view of the main lines of discussion that took place throughout Mira, and concludes with the…

Compares several "top-down" algorithms for identifying mirrored hosts on the Web. The algorithms operate on the basis of URL strings and linkage data: the type of information about Web pages easily available from Web proxies and crawlers. Results reveal that the best approach is a combination of five algorithms: on test data this…

Protein Annotators' Assistant (PAA) is a software system which assists protein annotators in assigning functions to newly sequenced proteins. PAA employs a number of information retrieval techniques in a novel setting and is thus related to text categorization, where multiple categories may be suggested, except that in this case none of the…

Discussion of visual information retrieval systems focuses on an approach for testing novel interfaces that uses bottom-up, stepwise testing to allow evaluation of a visualization itself, rather than restricting evaluation to the system instantiating it. Presents a case study of undergraduates that compares a new visualization technique to more…

This article compares the Web search engines Google and Teoma. Google is found to have better variety, the ability to save Web sites, flexibility, better coverage, and the ability to use Boolean logic. While Teoma wins the originality award, it is otherwise found to be limited. (CR)

One opinion piece and five articles in this issue discuss: digital preservation infrastructure; accomplishments and changes in the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative in 2001 and plans for 2002; video gaming and how it relates to digital libraries and learning technologies; overview of a music retrieval system; and the online version of the…

Reports on an exploratory study of the measurement of commonality in the use of variables or measures by authors and groups of authors who have reported on studies of information retrieval system users. There is some similarity to cocitation analysis: when two individual papers or two authors over several works, use the same variables, this…

Describes a prototype system--GeoMatch--that allows users to interactively define geographic areas of interest on a background map and to define, qualitatively or quantitatively, the relationship between the user-defined area and the map coverage. The knowledge discovery in database (KDD) factor is analyzed in the retrieval process. The MARC…

Focuses on the retrieval of numeric data from information sources that present special challenges. Describes a new method to deal with the challenge of accessing this special type of data indexed by unfamiliar metadata vocabularies. Extends the entry vocabulary module (EVM) approach to deal with numeric database searching. (AEF)

An author cocitation analysis of information retrieval research (1987 to 1997) from Social Scisearch via DIALOG analyzed the top 40 authors to reveal the intellectual structure of information retrieval. Concludes that cocitation analysis contributes to the understanding of intellectual structures in the sciences and possibly in other areas when…

Describes a methodology for creating networks of subject terms by manually representing a large number of common-sense activities that are broadly related to image subject terms. Application of this methodology to the Library of Congress Thesaurus for Graphic Materials produced 768 representations that supported users of a prototype browsing-based…

Proposes methods to utilize image primitives to support term assignment for image classification. Proposes to release code for image analysis in a common tool set for other researchers to use. Of particular focus is the expansion of work by researchers in image indexing to include image content-based feature extraction capabilities in their work.…

Provides an up-to-date survey of the capabilities of the major 16 search engines with respect to the types of information extraction tasks that would be useful in Web data mining and cybermetrics, and analyzes two sets of domain counts for internal consistency between results. (AEF)

Reports the preliminary findings of a research project that investigated users' mental models in the course of an image search. Generalist users searched a database of 1500 earth and space science images using a system that provided for both textual and content-based retrieval modalities. Factors such as ease of use and satisfaction with the…