Distributed resource discovery systems

Abstract

Large-scale network of information sources and digital libraries amplifies the information overload problem constantly. A popular resource discovery tool on the World Wide Web nowadays is centralized index server, which attempts to be a 'know-it-all' of online resources. It suffers from many shortcomings resulted from the centralization of metadata extraction, index building and query processing. A better approach is to use disparate index servers for individual resource repository. A user query is only routed to a site if the repository is likely to contain relevant resources. This task is often called collection selection, and the server to perform this is usually called meta-indexer. Nevertheless, most research projects assume a centralized meta-indexer which will eventually be degra...[ Read more ]