Reviews the factors to be considered in evaluating abstracts. Types of abstracts, content, length, writing style, comprehensive criteria for abstracts, readability, readability testing, compatibility with ANSI (American National Standards Institute) standards, and informativeness are among the topics covered. (12 references) (KRN)

Suggests a probabilistic method to compute the term relationships from relevance information, which complements the studies on a nonprobabilistic technique called pseudo-classification. A quadratic ranking function is derived by incorporating the term-by-term relationships. Procedures for estimating the required parameters are provided by…

Discussion of the growth of institutional image collections focuses on the development of a visual thesaurus to provide access to the photographic archive of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Addresses specific access problems, including the accurate and rapid description of images entering collections, and searching…

Discusses statistical word indexing for Japanese information-retrieval systems and proposes a new method that uses statistics about characters to evaluate a bi-gram's likelihood of being a word boundary. Describes a new segmentation strategy that extracts some overlapping segments and results in higher retrieval effectiveness. (Author/LRW)

Discusses the role of search engines in Web usability and analyzes and evaluates the retrieval effectiveness of various indexing and searching strategies on a new Web text collection. Highlights include preprocessing techniques that might improve retrieval effectiveness; and hyperlinks as useful sources of evidence in improving retrieval…

Discusses the search option on Web sites and explains how to develop a search engine. Highlights include search options, including Boolean operators, graphical interface, and language; platform and server compatibility; indexing; metadata; XML; customization options; installation and configuration; evaluation; usability; and cost. (LRW)

Presents an indexing and information retrieval method that, based on the vector space model, incorporates term dependencies and thus obtains semantically richer representations of documents. Highlights include term context vectors; techniques for estimating the dependencies among terms; term weights; experimental results on four text collections;…

Focuses on the growth of the United Kingdom company Ingenta in the United States. Highlights include a new partnership with Gale Group related to their InfoTrac databases; indexing and full text coverage; standards; and other Ingenta acquisitions. (LRW)

Proposes a fuzzy-image database model and a concept of fuzzy space; describes fuzzy-query processing in fuzzy space and fuzzy indexing on complete fuzzy vectors; and uses an example image database, the computer-aided facial-image inference and retrieval system (CAFIIR), for explanation throughout. (Author/LRW)

Discusses Web impact factors (WIFs), Web versions of the impact factors for journals, and how they can be calculated by using search engines. Highlights include HTML and document indexing; Web page links; a Web crawler designed for calculating WIFs; and WIFs for United Kingdom universities that measured research profiles or capability. (Author/LRW)

Discussion of research in image indexing and retrieval focuses on a study that analyzed citations and documents relevant to image indexing and retrieval obtained from the SCI (Science Citation Index) and SSCI (Social Science Citation Index). Results confirmed that there exist two distinctive research groups, employing the content-based and…

In addition to the LOM standard and instructional design specifications, as well as domain specific indexing vocabularies, a structured indexing vocabulary for the more elementary learning objects is advisable in order to support retrieval tasks of developers. Furthermore, because semantic indexing is seen as a difficult task, three issues…

Experiences in researching the documentation of the intelligence (codename Ultra) produced by breaking Enigma at Government Code & Cypher School, Bletchley Park, 1939-45, are described. The major problems are identified and shown to lie in the obscurity of the associated processes, disguised as they were within general bureaucratic…

The article gives an overview of social bookmarking in libraries and discusses the University of Central Florida (UCF) Libraries Delicious project and its outcomes in depth. It also addresses technical issues involved with setting up a library Delicious account; barriers to participation; training requirements; integration with other library sites…

Describes an experiment comparing the performance of an automatic full-text indexing software for personal computers (i.e., the Quick-Finder facility in WordPerfect 6.1 for Windows) with the human intellectual assignment of indexing terms to each document in a collection. Results are discussed in terms of ease of use, the time factor, and recall…