HRS:A Hypermedia Retrieval System

Abstract

The service of the World-Wide Web (WWW), a typical hypermedia system, has been the fastest growing hypermedia application on the Internet. It does not only bring us a new way of representing knowledge, but also a better way of accessing related informaiton. When users enter the hypermedia world like the World-Wide Web, they will face information overload. It requires an efficient way for users to search related topics. A practical solution is provided by our Hypermedia Retrieval System. In this research we have studied and designed a prototype of the Hypermedia Retrieval System,which was implemented under the World-Wide Web environment. The Hypermedia Retrieval System not only integrates the network resources available on the Internet, but also provides an efficient way for users to find the information they are interested in. There are four components in our system: the World-Wide Web server, the HTML parser, the query processor and the descriptor database. We use a hierarchical view approach to represent the real world scenario in the World-Wide Web. There are three levels of view approach: global view, locali view, and personal view. Each view reflects a different situation that users encounter in the World-Wide Web environment. A prototype system has been implemented in Sun SPARC workstations.