Focussed crawling

From IntraLibrary

by Koraljka Golub and John McNaught

Freda wants to find resources on Early Tudor furniture. She also wants to see images of furniture with geographic location where possible. She wishes to obtain information also on provenance of furniture items as well as construction techniques and materials used. She finds very few resources in her locally available databases. Widening her search using conventional engines increases recall but not sufficiently. She wants to discover specialised resources. She recognises these may be distributed over numerous collections. She wants help to identify relevant resources and items. She wants to use her specialised knowledge in cooperation with an information system, however as she is unused to 'advanced' search she wants the system to suggest useful queries to her. The system responds by returning relevant resources by using a focussed crawler in the background.