Intelligent retrieval of digital resources by exploiting their semantic context

Abstract

Although the first digital archives storing a huge number of resources came into existence years ago, they still lack effective retrieval methods. The most obvious example is the World Wide Web: search engines are improved constantly, however, their hits are still unsatisfactory apart from simplest queries. Most prosperous solutions employ user contexts to estimate the user's information demand and use this information to deliver more adequate results. In the current paper we introduce the idea of resource context-based information retrieval. In this approach, semantic context description is assigned to each digital resource known to the system and this semantic metadata are exploited by each step during an intelligent search process. Our solution is implemented and evaluated in the VICODI project, as part of a web portal for European history. © Springer-Verlag 2004.