Unifying Access to Heterogeneous Document Databases Through Contextual Metadata

Document databases available on the Internet carry massive information resources. To a person needing a piece of information on a specific domain, finding the piece, however, is often quite problematic even though there were a representative collection of databases available on the domain. The languages used in the content, the names of document types, their structures, the ways documents are organized and their retrieval techniques often vary in the databases. The databases containing legal information on the Internet offer a typical example. For finding relevant documents and for being able to interpret the content of the documents correctly, the user may need information about the context where the documents have been created. In this chapter we introduce a method for collecting contextual metadata and for representing the metadata to the users by graphical models. The solution is demonstrated by a case of retrieving information from distributed European legal databases.