Indexing the Internet

Abstract

Navigation around information resources on the Internet is assisted by browsing software such as the gopher, lynx, Mosaic and Netscape. The variety and complexity of resources has meant there have been calls for metainformation so that there are resident on the network, tools for guidance to the resources using classified or index term approaches.

Searching software used in association with the browsing software has functionality that may be compared with that of vendor-operated information retrieval systems. Although this functionality is relatively limited, when used with HTML documents, relevance feedback assists retrieval via associative mechanisms.

Documents published electronically using SGML standards are able to contain their own surrogates and therefore be self-indexed and self-classified by the authors, however because the author view does not necessarily represent the user view, it is still necessary to have user-oriented retrieval aids.

Menu-linked approaches via gophers or via home pages constructed for WWW browsing software mean that users can superimpose their own classified view of resources. Therefore, rather than attempting an overall classification of what is on the Internet, multiple classification systems may be constructed, reflecting the orientations of the different disciplines of users.

A model is suggested for construction of such classified approaches with reference to the way they may use existing retrieval systems, automatic indexing, and thesauri that have been manually or automatically constructed.