The Utah Text Retrieval Project - A Status Report

The Utah Text Retrieval Project addresses a number of areas in information retrieval, including basic system structure, user interfaces integrating information retrieval with word processing, indexing techniques, and the use of specialized backend processors. Although the work on the development of a high-speed text search engine is generally the best known, probably the most exciting aspect of the project is the message-based architecture, which provides an adaptable testbed for information retrieval techniques. It can support a variety of index and search strategies, while instrumenting their performance so that they can be accurately compared in an identical environment.This paper describes the goals and design decisions for the Utah Retrieval System Architecture (URSA). It discusses the prototype system's features and limitations, and the changes that will be made to produce the production version.