Hybrid-Search and Storage of Semi-structured
Information
Eytan Adar
Given today's tangle of digital information, one of
the hardest tasks for information systems users is finding anything in
the mess. For a number of well documented reasons including the
amazing growth in the Internet's popularity and the drop in the cost
of storage, the amount of information on the net, as well as on a
user's localcomputer has increased dramatically in recent
years. Although this readily available information should be extremely
beneficial for computer users, paradoxically it is now much harder to
find anything.
Many different solutions have been proposed to the
general information seeking task of users, but few if any have
addressed the needs of individuals or have leveraged the benet of
single-user interaction. The Haystack project is an attempt to answer
the needs of the individual user. Creating such a system requires
solving two problems. Half the problem addresses the manipulation of
the data into a queryable format. Once the user's information is
represented in Haystack, the other half of the problem centers around
our desire to answer the highly varied questions a user may ask about
this information. In this thesis we will propose a means of
representing information in a robust model within Haystack and we will
describe a corresponding mechanism by which the diverse questions of
the individual can be answered. This novel method functions by using a
combination of existing information systems. We will call this
combined system a hybrid-search system.
Available as: Postscript (1.5mb), Gzipped Postscript (300kb), PDF (650kb), and HTML
Adar, Eytan, "Hybrid-Search and Storage of Semi-structured
Information", Master's Thesis, MIT, May 1998.
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