A unified interface for integrating information retrieval

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a unified interface and a flexible architecture for querying various information sources on the Internet and the WWW using both a popular object model and a data model. We propose an Integrated Information Retrieval MR) service based on the Common Object Service Specification (COSS) for Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) and apply the Document Type Definition (DTD) of eXtensible Mark-up Language XML) to define the metadata of information sources for sharing the ontology between mediator and wrappers, The objective of using the IIR design is not only to provide programmers with a uniform interface for coding a software application that can query a variety of information sources on the Internet, but also to create a flexible and extensible environment that easily allows system developers to add new or updated wrappers to the system. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.