WEBTRIEVE: A Testbed System for Distributed Information Retrieval

Joaquim Macedo, António Costa and Vasco Freitas

Universidade do Minho
Departamento de Informática
P-4700-320 Braga, Portugal

Tel.: +351 253 604475
Fax.: +351 253 604471
E-mail: {macedo,costa,vf (at) uminho.pt}


Abstract

Centralized information retrieval has a large number of well known drawbacks. Most of them can be overcame with distributed information retrieval architectures.

Even with important research done, a lot of work is still needed before distributed information retrieval systems become a real alternative to the popular Internet search services, based on centralized architectures.

Webtrieve is a prototype system and it is intended to be used as an user friendly testbed to evaluate selection, fusion, allocation, replication and other relevant algorithms and components in distributed information retrieval framework.

Webtrieve architecture includes all the needed components to evaluate not only each algorithm by itself, but also the performance of the possible combinations of the available algorithms for different system components.

Keywords: Distributed Information Retrieval, Data Fusion Database Selection, Replication, Testbed System.


3rd Asian Digital Libraries Conference (ICADL), Seoul, Korea, Dec 6-8, 2000