The work reported is part of a series of studies aimed at providing information and assistance to the National Library of Medicine (NLM) in planning the Biomedical Communications Network (BCN). The first part reviews the literature on systems relevant to BCN design, documents System Development Corporation's position with respect to certain…

Describes a comparative study of the "help" facilities of 16 interactive information retrieval systems. Guidelines for the design of a "help" facility are presented and then used to evaluate the quality and friendliness of each system. Suggestions for the improvement of online "help" facilities are discussed. (31…

Describes rough sets theory and discusses the advantages it offers for information retrieval, including the implicit inclusion of Boolean logic, term weighting, ranked retrieval output, and relevance feedback. Rough set formalism is compared to Boolean, vector, and fuzzy models of information retrieval and a small scale evaluation of rough sets is…

This paper presents the design of an Internet-enabled search service that supports educational resource discovery within an educational brokerage service. More specifically, it presents the design and implementation of a metadata-driven approach to implementing the distributed search and retrieval of Internet-based educational resources and…

Describes a new Boolean retrieval environment in which an extended soft Boolean logic is used to automatically construct queries from original natural language formulations provided by users. Experimental results that compare the retrieval effectiveness of this method to conventional Boolean and vector processing are discussed. (27 references)…

Provides an overview of methods for improving the effectiveness of Boolean retrieval systems, including document clustering, relevance feedback, weighted term searching, ranked output, and fuzzy set theory. The discussion of experimental studies with the SMART and SIRE systems focuses on the implementation and results of these methods. (69…

As the fourteenth report in a series describing research in automatic information storage and retrieval, this document covers work carried out on the SMART project for approximately one year (summer 1967 to summer 1968). The document is divided into four main parts: (1) SMART systems design, (2) analysis and search experiments, (3) user feedback…