The promises of network-accessible information are increasingly difficult to achieve. These difficulties are due to a variety of causes, such as, the rapid growth in the volume of network-available information and the increasing complexity, diversity and terminological fluctuations of the different information sources available. This paper presents a conceptual architecture for the organisation information space across collections of component systems in multi-databases that provides serendipity, exploration and contextualisation support so that users can achieve logical connections between concepts they are familiar with and schema terms employed in multi-database systems. Large-scale searching for multi-database schema information is guided by a combination of lexical, structural and semantic aspects of schema terms in order to reveal more meaning both about the contents of a requested information term and about its placement within the distributed information space. 1

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.