Mark A. Sheldon, Andrzej Duda, Ron Weiss, and David K. Gifford
Proceedings of the Third International World Wide Web Conference Elsevier, North Holland
Computer Networks and ISDN Systems, April 1995

We have built an HTTP based resource discovery system called Discover that provides a single point of access to over 500 WAIS servers. Discover provides two key services: query refinement and query routing. Query refinement helps a user improve a query fragment to describe the user's interests more precisely. Once a query has been refined and describes a manageable result set, query routing automatically forwards the query to the WAIS servers that contain relevant documents. Abbreviated descriptions of WAIS sites called content labels are used by the query refinement and query routing algorithms. Our experimental results suggest that query refinement in conjunction with the query routing provides an effective way to discover resources in a large universe of documents. Our experience with query refinement has convinced us that the expansion of query fragments is essential for using a large, dynamically changing, heterogenous distributed information system.

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