SIGIR 2003 workshop on distributed information retrieval

Abstract

During the last decade companies, governments, and research groups worldwide have directed significant effort towards the creation of sophisticated digital libraries across a variety of disciplines. As digital libraries proliferate, in a variety of media, and from a variety of sources, problems of resource selection and data fusion become major obstacles. Traditional search engines, even very large systems such as Google, are unable to provide access to the “Hidden Web” of information that is only available via digital library search interfaces. Effective, reliable information retrieval also requires the ability to pose multimedia queries across many digital libraries. The answer to a query about the lyrics to a folk song might be text or an audio recording, but few systems today could deliver both data types in response to a single, simple query. Distributed Information Retrieval addresses issues that arise when people have routine access to thousands of multimedia digital libraries.