Rapid growth in data volume, user base, and data diversity render Internet-accessible information increasingly difficult to use effectively. In this paper we introduce Harvest, a system that provides an integrated set of customizable tools for gathering information from diverse repositories, building topic-specific content indexes, flexibly searching the indexes, widely replicating them, and caching objects as they are retrieved across the Internet. The system interoperates with WWW clients and with HTTP,FTP, Gopher, and NetNews information resources. We discuss the design and implementation of Harvest and its subsystems, give examples of its uses, and provide measurements indicating that Harvest can significantly reduce server load, network traffic, and space requirements when building indexes, compared with previous systems. We also discuss several popular indexes wehave built using Harvest, underscoring the customizability and scalability of the system.

Abstract We present a pipelining, dynamically user-controllable reorder operator, for use in data-intensive applications. Allowing the user to reorder the data delivery on the fly increases the interactivity in several contexts such as online aggregation and large-scale spreadsheets; it allows the user to control the processing of data by dynamically specifying preferences for different data items based on prior feedback, so that data of interest is prioritized for early processing.

This document contains the generic background and targets of the Advanced Information Space Browser, which is planned to be included in the Decomate-II library information system at Tilburg University. It gives an overview of the current state-of-the-art in information retrieval, focusing especially on topic browsers, thesauri, and semantic networks. Some preliminary ideas for actual implementations are included as well.

Although software reuse presents clear advantages for programmer productivity and code reliability, it is not practiced enough. One of the reasons for the only moderate success of reuse is the lack of software libraries that facilitate the actual locating and understanding of reusable components. This paper describes a technology for automatically assembling large software libraries that promote software reuse by helping the user locate the components closest to her/his needs. Software libraries are automatically assembled from a set of unorganized components by using information retrieval techniques. The construction of the library is done in two steps. First, attributes are automatically extracted from natural language documentation by using a new free-text indexing scheme based on the notions of lexical a nities and quantity of information. Then, a hierarchy for browsing is automatically generated using a clustering technique that draws only on the information provided by the attributes. Thanks to the free-text indexing scheme, tools following this approach can accept free-style natural language queries. This technology has been implemented in the Guru system, which has been applied to construct an organized library of Aix utilities. An experiment was conducted in order to evaluate the retrieval e ectiveness of Guru as compared to InfoExplorer, ahypertext library system for Aix 3 on the IBM RS/6000 series, as well as to two other indexing schemes. We followed the usual evaluation procedure used in information retrieval, based upon recall and precision measures, and determined that our system retrieved more e ectively than the others. 1