PaperFinder: A Tool for Scalable Search of Digital Libraries

The invention and spread of the World Wide Web made the process of paper publication significantly easier than before, and added a large repository of on-line (electronic) papers to our body of knowledge. To make the process of information gathering easier for scientists, Digital Libraries usually maintain Search Engines, which can be used to find papers about a specified topic. However, the use of these Search Engines suffers from two significant disadvantages. First, the user cannot guide his query to the Search Engines of different Digital Libraries at once. The same query has to be sent to several Search Engines in order to retrieve papers from conferences/journals organized by different institutions. Second, Search Engines do not keep track of the documents retrieved during a previous issue of the same query. Thus, every time a query is issued by a user, (almost) the same results will be returned to him. In this project, we use the basic concepts behind the implementation of USEwebNET [Markatos 98] in order to face the problems described above. In the rest of this poster paper, we will describe PaperFinder, a tool that continually searches digital libraries of scientific publications, filters only the relevant papers, and delivers them to interested scientists through a friendly user-interface.