Michael A. Shepherd

A common interface for accessing document retrieval systems and dbms for retrieval of bibliographic data

Abstract Due to their ready availability, database management systems are being applied to bibliographic databases with increasing frequency. This is being done in spite of the fact that although DBMS query languages tend to be very powerful, they are far too complex for the casual user. It is proposed that PSI, an existing virtual-system intermediary for document retrieval systems, be extended to include access to DBMS containing bibliographic data in order to circumvent the complexity problem or the casual user. PSI currently provides a common command language for access to multiple document retrieval systems. It is shown that PSI could be extended to provide this same command language to access DBMS, whether the DBMS are relational or network.

The profile-query relationship

This research defines the relationship between a user profile and a user query in terms of the relationship between the clusters of documents that are retrieved by the profile and by the query, respectively. The document clusters were generated by performing retrieval at various threshold levels on profiles and related queries. Profiles were artificially generated based on documents by an author. Queries were artificially generated to cover the full range of the relationship as defined by the cosine similarity measure. The resulting clusters were examined and it was found that, given a desired retrieval threshold, cluster similarity and cluster overlap can be expressed as linear functions of the similarity existing between the original pairs of profiles and queries.