CINDI: A Virtual Library Indexing and Discovery System

THIS ARTICLE DPSCRIBES A SYSTEM CALLED CINDI for cataloging and searching documents in a distributed virtual library. Mihen putting a document in the library, the author provides and registers metadata in the form of a semantic header for the document. The semantic header contains information on both the syntactic and semantic content of the document. An expert system simulating the expertise of a cataloging librarian helps the provider fill the semantic header according to accepted library practice. Later, if someone is searching for documents in the library, then this searcher is helped by another component of the expert system in properly formulating the query. This component simulates the expertise of a reference librarian. The system then uses information provided by the semantic headers in locating and accessing documents wanted by the searcher.