CINDI: A virtual library indexing and discovery system

THIS ARTICLE DESCRIBES A SYSTEM CALLED CINDI for cataloging and searching d ocuments in a distributed virtual library. When putting a document in the l ibrary, the author provides and registers metadata in die form of a semanti c header for the document. The semantic header contains information on both the syntactic and semantic content of the document. An expert system simul ating the expertise of a cataloging librarian helps the provider fill the s emantic header according to accepted library practice. Later, if someone is searching for documents in the library then this searcher is helped by ano ther component of the expert system in properly formulating the query. This component simulates the expertise of a reference librarian. The system the n uses information provided by the semantic headers in locating and accessi ng documents wanted by the searcher.