Constructing a Virtual Digital Library for Browsing Conceptually Structured Document Collection

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We have developed by referring to the activities in a traditional library a virtual digital library (a kind of information systems), in which any user can satisfy' his/her information needs by browsing a systematically structured document collection. The documents for a digital library are the textual data in the Internet filtered through a user-profile, a list of descriptions about user's interests, and are pre-arranged such that the conceptually related ones are given similar (but different) integer numbers. Since the conceptually related documents to the query can form clusters by this numbering, the numbering process corresponds to the indexing task seen in the usual library activities.When a user poses his/her query (which will be given the smallest number) the above document numbering is re-arranged such that the documents conceptually related to the query are given small numbers as much as possible. A virtual digital library is constructed by placing the query and the document clusters on a distance space, where their coordinates reflect the above document numbering.The user can satisfy his/her information needs by browsing the clusters placed close to the query and/or to the clusters containing the relevant documents to the query. To assist the browsing process, a VRML/JAVA oriented navigator on WWW is also designed and realized. The browsing capability proposed here is shown to work more effectively than the ranking capability widely utilized in the usual retrieval engines.