Abstract |
The World Wide Web grows at alarming rates, making information retrieval an increasingly dificult process. Traditional search methods based on search-engines usually flood the users with an overwhelming number of URLs. If a user wants to stay up-to-date on some issue and he repeatedly queries the above search engines, s(h)e will be repeatedly flooded with (almost) the same set of URLs, out of which only a small percentage will point to new,previously unseen documents. In the first the first part of this thesis, a resource discovery tool built on top of traditional search engines and called USEwebNET. USEwebNET registers each user's interests and repeatedly queries several search engines for URLs matching a user's registered interests. USEwebNET keeps track of which URLs have been visited by each user. Thus, when a user invokes USEwebNET, he is presented only with new or "unvisited" URLs. The secord part of this thesis,focus in an extension of USEwebNET implemented especially for the area of digital libraries and called PaperFinder. PaperFinder, aims in helping scientists to keep track of the articles, which they are interested in among the growing number of papers, that become available on-line. It operates on top of popular Digital Libraries of scientific publications, filters only relevant papers delivers them to the users. PaperFinder may operate in a Keyword-based Mode, where scientists present a list of keywords that describe their field of interest, and in a Resource-discovery Mode, where scintists present one or more "seed papers", that describe a field of interest. In the latter, PaperFinder searches for papers that are revelant to htre seed paper and sorts the result by calculating their revelance to the seed paper.
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