Over the past several years, a number of information discovery and access tools have been introduced in the Internet, including Archie, Gopher, Netfind, and WAIS. These tools have become quite popular, and are helping to redefine how people think about wide area network applications. Yet, they are not well suited to supporting the future information infrastructure, which will be characterized by enormous data volume, rapid growth in the user base, and burgeoning data diversity. In this paper we indicate trends in these three dimensions, and survey problems these trends will create for current approaches. We then suggest several promising directions of future resource discovery research, along with some initial results from projects carried out by members of the Internet Research Task Force Research Group on Resource Discovery and Directory Service.

Search engines are the most powerful resources for finding information on the rapidly expanding World-Wide Web. Finding the desired search engines and learning how to use them, however, can be very time consuming. Metasearch engines, which integrate a group of such search tools, enable users to access information across the world in a transparent and more efficient manner. The recent emergence of visual information retrieval (VIR) systems on the Web is leading to the same efficiency problem. This paper describes MetaSEEk, a meta-search engine used for retrieving images based on their visual content on the Web. MetaSEEk is designed to intelligently select and interface with multiple on-line image search engines by ranking their performance for different classes of user queries. User feedback is also integrated in the ranking refinement. MetaSEEk has been developed to explore the issues involved in querying large, distributed, on-line visual information system sources. We compare MetaSEE...

When searching information in a retrieval system, people use a variety of terms to describe their information needs. When the terms used in a query are different from those indexed by the system, users fail to obtain the information they want. This is called the vocabulary problem. This problem has been studied and discussed in information retrieval for decades. Recently Deerwester et. al proposed a new technique based on singular value decomposition and obtained promising results. In this paper, we describe how to apply this technique to Internet resource discovery.

ely automatically, creates information repositories accessible through any HTTP-compliant browser. Users can browse or query a repository for items of interest. In this article, we explain the InfoHarness approach to metadata extraction and heterogeneous information management. We also describe VisualHarness, which extends the basic system to accommodate visual data. Finally, we describe how to use InfoHarness tools and hooks to create other Web-based, information-intensive applications. 18 NOVEMBER . DECEMBER 1999 http://computer.org/internet/ 1089 7801/99/$10.00 1999 IEEE IEEE INTERNET COMPUTING INFOHARNESS 19 IEEE INTERNET COMPUTING http://computer.org/internet/ NOVEMBER . DECEMBER 1999 METADATA-CENTERED APPROACH Other researchers have investigated the use of metadata to support runtime access to original information 1 and data warehousing and mini

L oosely coupled distributed systems are characterised by a separation of resources and a consequent need for a facility to aid in the location of those resources. Traditionally, this role of resource location has been fulfilled by a name service i.e. a facility which maps the name of a resource to its location at a given network address. As the size of the resource name space grows, however, additional support for resource location is required, in the form of support for the discovery of the name of the resource that is to be located. A trading facility implements an approach to resource location which eliminates the need to know the name of a resource in order to locate it and instead allows specification of a required service in an abstract manner. Resources (or services) are classified by type, and the location of such services is guided principally by a specification of the required service type, with requests for services being mapped directly to services of an appropriate type...

In our previous work [shk94], we have discussed providing integrated and rapid access to existing heterogeneous information without any restructuring, reformatting or relocation of data. Such access is achieved through the generation of metadata that encapsulates the original information. We are currently working on designing a data modelling language aimed at controlling the metadata generation process. In this paper, we discuss applying this language to modelling heterogeneous information and demonstrate the ease with which the information may be made available for search and browsing.

The "InfoHarness" prototype is aimed at providing integrated and rapid access to huge amounts of heterogeneous information independent of its type, representation, and location. InfoHarness provides advanced search and browsing capabilities without imposing the burden of restructuring, reformatting or relocating information on information suppliers. This is achieved through creating metadata entries (e.g., type, location, access rights, owner, creation date, etc.) and associating them with the original information. The metadata extraction methods ensure rapid and largely automatic creation of information repositories. A stable hierarchy of abstract classes is proposed to organize the processing and representation needs of different types of information. An extensible hierarchy of terminal classes simplifies support for new information types and utilization of new indexing technologies. InfoHarness repositories may be accessed through Mosaic or any other HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTT...

Rapid growth in the volume of data, complexity, diversity and terminological variations render networkaccessible information increasingly difficult to achieve. This paper compares current approaches in networkedbased information retrieval, Internet resource discovery and multi-agent systems and presents a set of criteria for improving the quality of networkedinformation delivery. It subsequently presents an information elicitation scheme based on these criteria in order to enhance scalability, accelerate searches and make interactions in a large collection of networkeddatabases more tractable. 1 Introduction Contemporary wide-area information networks provide large, rapidly evolving and autonomously managed information spaces. Such inter-networked information access systems have placed vast amounts of information within easy reach for users. However, information access is quite intricate not only due to the sheer volume of information available, but also because of naming conventions...

Search engines are the most powerful resources for finding information on the rapidly expanding World Wide Web (WWW). Finding the desired search engines and learning how to use them, however, can be very time consuming. The integration of such search tools enables the users to access information across the world in a transparent and efficient manner. These systems are called meta-search engines. The recent emergence of visual information retrieval (VIR) search engines on the web is leading to the same efficiency problem. This paper describes and evaluates MetaSEEk, a content-based meta-search engine used for finding images on the Web based on their visual information. MetaSEEk is designed to intelligently select and interface with multiple on-line image search engines by ranking their performance for different classes of user queries. User feedback is also integrated in the ranking refinement. We compare MetaSEEk with a base line version of meta-search engine, which does not use the pa...

A selective dissemination of information (SDI) system attempts to facilitate users' information retrieval and information filtering needs. With the rise of the internet as an information source, the volume of information available ranging across all interests has exploded, and difficulties in surveying, querying, and filtering information pertaining to individuals' interests increase with this explosion. The goal of an SDI system is to deliver new information arriving at an SDI-aware information provider to users who express their interests via user profiles. Mechanisms used to implement such SDI systems vary; one such option is a persistent query mechanism. Users create and pose queries to an SDI system; queries remain resident in the system which works to somehow match documents and users. Successful matches are delivered from the SDI system back to users. In this thesis