Generalizing GlOSS to Vector-Space Databases and Broker Hierarchies

Abstract

As large numbers of text databases have become available on the Internet, it is harder to locate the right sources for given queries. In this paper we present gGlOSS, a generalized Glossary-Of-Servers Server, that keeps statistics on the available databases to estimate which databases are the potentially most useful for a given query. gGlOSS extends our previous work [1], which focused on databases using the boolean model of document retrieval, to cover databases using the more sophisticated vector-space retrieval model. We evaluate our new techniques using real-user queries and 53 databases. Finally, we further generalize our approach by showing how to build a hierarchy of gGlOSS brokers. The top level of the hierarchy is so small it could be widely replicated, even at end-user workstations. This research was sponsored by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) of the Department of Defense under Grant No. MDA972-92-J-1029 with the Corporation for National Research Initiatives The views and conclusions contained in this document are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as necessarily representing the offcial policies or endorsement, either expressed or implied, of ARPA, the U.S. Government or CNRI. This work was supported by an equipment grant from IBM Corporation. Permission to copy without fee all or part of this material is granted provided that the copies are not made or distributed for direct commercial advantage, the VLDB copyright notice and the title of the publication and its date appear, and notice is given that copying is by permission of the Very Large Data Base Endowment. To copy otherwise, or to republish, requires a fee and/or special permission from the Endowment. Proceedings of the 21st VLDB Conference Z urich, Switzerland, 1995