Discussion of XML focuses on indexing techniques for XML documents, grouping them into flat-file, semistructured, and structured indexing paradigms. Highlights include searching techniques, including full text search and multistage search; search result presentations; database and information retrieval system integration; XML query languages; and…

Discusses recommendation, or preference ordering, in document retrieval systems that ranks documents in order of the likelihood with which they match the preferences of any person searching the system. Describes the ERIn (Evaluation-Recommendation-Information) model, a decision-theoretic framework for understanding information-related activity…

Discussion of the information needs of medical professionals and researchers focuses on the architecture of a Web portal designed to integrate advanced searching and indexing algorithms, an automatic thesaurus, and self-organizing map technologies to provide searchers with fine-grained results. Reports results of evaluation of spider algorithms…

Discusses problems when searching the Web for financial information and presents a personal agent that utilizes user profiles and user relevance feedback to search for Chinese Web financial news articles on behalf of users. Explains the development of a Chinese indexing component and describes experiments that measured the performance of the…

Describes EquiX, a search language for XML that combines querying with searching to query the data and the meta-data content of Web pages. Topics include search engines; a data model for XML documents; search query syntax; search query semantics; an algorithm for evaluating a query on a document; and indexing EquiX queries. (LRW)