Research: Demonstrators: Information Gateways and the international perspective

Information Gateways and the International Perspective

Marianne Peereboom, KB, The Netherlands
Dan Brickley, ILRT, UK

The following annotated links are to demonstrations prepared for the presentation at the Koninklijke Bibliotheek DESIRE workshop, Den Haag, 15 September 1999.

Cross Searching

The ability to provide end users with the ability to search across multiple Information Gateways is a core concern in the gateway research community. A number of technical and interface options are available; we show a number of different examples here to illustrate the options available.

Example 1: hand-targetted service selection

Notes... This shows the default facilities available from tools such as ROADS. Many challenges remain: how do users know which service to search? How can we avoid best overloading servers by broadcasting queries to each gateway every time? How can we build a user interface appropriate for large result sets from multiple gateways?

Example 2: integration of cross-searching into production services

ILRT and KB have been collaborating on the use of ROADS/DESIRE distributed search systems for the DutchESS and SOSIG services. The service shown here is a pre-release prototype, but illustrates the way in which the freely available ROADS software can be integrated into an existing environment with relative ease.

• http://www.konbib.nl/dutchess/roads/ (example search: stress)

Example 3: automated query routing

TF-CHIC interface (example search: description= immigration canada)

Notes... In this version, we use a different search tool whose behaviour is more automated. The CHIC software (currently being integrated into ROADS) will automatically follow 'hints' from server to server to locate records matching the query. Issues: how to allow users some control over this behaviour? How to deal with errors, delays, large result sets...

Example 4: My-DESIRE RDF Portal demo (cross browsing and cross searching)

Warning! this is more experimental than the above demos; it may not always work

Experimental DESIRE search/browse interface (using W3C's RDF technology)

• select SOSIG, EELS, SOSIG harvester, DutchESS and search for 'cognitive psychology'
• Add a 'new channel' of information to your 'myDESIRE' portal (recommendations from trusted sources, ROADS 'whats new' listings, mailing list summaries etc)
• Browse into distributed information sources through a single common interface (eg. 'DutchESS' listings, 'WWW Virtual Library' listings; what issues does this raise?)

Example 5: cross browsing (production service)

The browsable catalogue of the SOSIG gateway includes records that are managed by the Biz/ed gateway. For SOSIG users, this does not matter: the only clue is a different logo 'brand' next to the records.

Examples:

• Labour and Industrial relations section (first two records are from SOSIG, then some from Biz/ed)

Notes... This was achieved through some recent extensions to the ROADS system, where we are exploring frameworks for sharing structured descriptions of the content of other gateways, to allow richer interfaces. In the case of Biz/ed and SOSIG, it was necessary to map between the UDC and Dewey classifications used by each gateway.

W3C Resource Description Framework (RDF)

It is not within the scope of this presentation to show exactly how RDF is used in this last set of demos. Very briefly...

We use W3C RDF standard...

• ...to describe the information gateways themselves
• ...to describe records returned from search each gateway, regardless of search protocol
• ...to describe channels of information from useful datasources ('whats new' listings)
• ...to describe hierarchical sitemaps for browsing into distributed databases
• ...to represent all the information used to generate the My-DESIRE portal interface