Argues that the best strategy for building integrated, personalized information systems consists of linguistically oriented knowledge and inference, rather than artificial intelligence techniques. The discussion addresses difficulties in the evaluation of such systems and strategies for devising performance studies. (five references) (CLB)

Built using a distributed architecture, this prototype distributed information retrieval system uses statistical ranking techniques to provide better service to the end user. Distributed architecture was shown to be a feasible alternative to centralized or CD-ROM information retrieval, and user testing of the ranking methodology showed both…