Addressing the Metadata Gap

Digital documents are crucial for day-to-day organizational work, but as yet their management is personalized, erratic, unsystematic; both the research on text databases and the practice of document management can benefit from an improved understanding of this complex context and the roles of metadata in it. We will review empirical studies of document work in organizations and consider both traditional and emerging roles for metadata in ad hoc document work settings. After identifying these roles, we will analyze a metadata standard implemented in HTML (the Dublin Core) for its suitability for supporting metadata use in this context. Directions for practice and research are offered prior to the concluding remarks.

Markup Languages and Electronic Commerce

In this chapter, we provide a brief description of the development of markup languages, describe their role in the context of web application development and deployment, and finally provide an example of an XML application for a simple Web page displaying a typical sales invoice. Our objective in this example is to illustrate the relationship between the relational and XML representation of data that is required for the use of XML in the development of web-based applications in electronic commerce.

Interactive Query Expansion with Automatically Generated Category-Specific Thesauri

The categorization of documents into subject-specific categories is a useful enhancement for large document collections addressed by information retrieval systems, as a user can first browse a category tree in search of the category that best matches her interests and then issue a query for more specific documents “from within the category.” This approach combines two modalities in information seeking that are most popular in Web-based search engines, i.e., category-based site browsing (as exemplified by, e.g., Yahoo™) and keyword-based document querying (as exemplified by, e.g., AltaVista™). Appropriate query expansion tools need to be provided, though, in order to allow the user to incrementally refine her query through further retrieval passes, thus allowing the system to produce a series of subsequent document rankings that hopefully converge to the user’s expected ranking. In this work we propose that automatically generated, category-specific “associative” thesauri be used for such purpose. We discuss a method for their generation and discuss how the thesaurus specific to a given category may usefully be endowed with “gateways” to the thesauri specific to its parent and children categories.

Search Engines, Relevancy, and the World Wide Web

This chapter presents a survey and discussion of the relevancy rankings assigned by search engines to pages in their indices. An examination of methodologies whose goal it is to improve the relevancy of search results follows. The chapter concludes with a look at emerging trends in search engine technologies and directions for future research.