FEDERATING DIVERSE COLLECTIONS OF SCIENTIFIC LITERATURE

The Digital Library initiative (DLI) project at the University of Illi nois at Urbana-Champaign is developing the information infrastructure to effectively search technical documents on the Internet. The authors are constructing a large test-bed of scientific literature, evaluatin g its effectiveness under significant use, and researching enhanced se arch technology. They are building repositories (organized collections ) of indexed multiple-source collections and federating (merging and m apping) them by searching the material via multiple views of a single virtual collection. Developing widely usable Web technology is also a key goal. Improving Web search beyond full-text retrieval will require using document structure in the short term and document semantics in the long term. Their testbed efforts concentrate on journal articles f rom the scientific literature, with structure specified by the Standar d Generalized Markup Language (SGML). Research efforts extract semanti cs from documents using the scalable technology of concept spaces base d on context frequency. They then merge these efforts with traditional library indexing to provide a single Internet interface to indexes of multiple repositories.