GRAPHICAL INFORMATION-RETRIEVAL BY BROWSING META-INFORMATION

This paper discusses an approach to alleviate the problem in informati on retrieval of finding the right information. This problem arises in traditional query-based systems when users do not have enough knowledg e about the domain or if they do not have an articulate information ne ed. We address this problem by combining information about the documen ts and about the domain of the documents. This meta-information can th en be browsed by the users with a graphical browser. Several navigatio n aids help the user to find his way. The system contains a representa tion of the medical domain and records from the Medline literature dat abase. The paper discusses the representation of the meta-information, the browser and the evaluation of the system. (C) 1997 Elsevier Scien ce Ireland Ltd.