QUEST – querying specialized collections on theweb

Abstract

Ensuring access to specialized web-collections in a fast evolving web environment requires flexible techniques for orientation and querying. The adoption of meta search techniques for web-collections is hindered by the enormous heterogeneity of the resources. In this paper we introduce QUEST—a system for querying specialized collections on the web. One focus of QUEST is to unify search fields from different collections by relating the search concepts to each other in a concept-taxonomy. To identify the most relevant collections according to a user query, we propose an associationbased strategy. Furthermore the Frankurt Core is introduced—a metadata-scheme for describing web-collections as a whole. Its fields are filled automatically by a metadata-collector component. Finally a prototype of QUEST is presented, demonstrating the integration of the techniques in an overall architecture.