Abstract

Introduction To support information retrieval in astronomy, we believe that it is advantageous if the retrieval engine is astronomically-knowledgeable. In other words, the user ought not to have to fight against the limitations of the indexing or querying system. Consider, for example, a retrieval system which rejects a partially numeric object name (e.g. 47 Tuc) on the grounds of supporting character-text only. Organisationlly, we see this work as: (i) selecting important desiderata, and (ii) finding tools which support these requirements. As such desiderata, we have chosen the following issues: (i) Is there a comprehensive astronomical vocabulary available, which ought to be in large measure supported by a retrieval system? We use the IAU Thesaurus, towards this end. (ii) The next phase will involve support of astronomical object names: what tools are available to support free text querying based on object names? (iii) A third phase will seek to go beyond that: to support add

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