EuroSearch

A Multilingual European Federated Search Service

Projektzeitraum:

Vom 01. 01. 1998 bis zum 31. 10. 1999

Kontaktpersonen:

• Prof. Dr.-Ing. Norbert Fuhr
• Dr. Mounia Lalmas
• Dipl.-Inform. Norbert Gövert

Gesponsert von:

• Language Engineering Sector of the Telematics Applications Programme

Referenznummer:

LE4-8303

Teilnehmende Institutionen:

• Italia Online S. p. A., Italy
• Universität Dortmund, Germany
• Xarxa Cinet S. L., Spain
• Eurospider Information Technology AG, Switzerland
• Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, Italy
• Gruner + Jahr Electronic Media Service GmbH, Germany

The EuroSearch project aims to help restore the linguistic and cultural equilibrium on the Web by building a pan-European federation of national search and categorization services. Initially comprising services from Italy, Spain, and Switzerland, the EuroSearch federation will constitute a distributed, multilingual searching service, permitting users to enter queries in their own, or their preferred language, and to carry out search and information retrieval over some or all of the federation's national sites. Each national site will be responsible for maintaining and operating a search service dedicated to its own language, so that the needs of each language community will be catered for by native speakers of that language.

At the same time, particular attention will be paid to ensuring that the Eurosearch framework is open and extensible to countries and services which are not currently represented, while the consortium will actively promote the federation concept with a view to future enlargement.

The Eurosearch federation will be supported, in this important and highly competitive area, by enhancements to existing services which will improve the quality of Web search and information retrieval. In addition to a common user interface, to be implemented in each local language, together with mechanisms for automatically redirecting queries to the appropriate partners according to user language, profile, and stated requirements, the project will also develop techniques which allow for more subject- oriented querying of information via the automatic classification of Web information according to its content, and will also cross language retrieval, where a query expressed in one language can retrieve information expressed in a different language.

The project will therefore make a concrete contribution to the realisation of an open, multilingual Information Society, by simplifying and extending access to Web information in and across a number of different European languages. On the one hand, information providers will benefit in that their information is made accessible to the widest possible audience, irrespective of the language in which it is expressed, while on the other seekers of information will benefit from a more congenial access to information, adapted to their own cultural and linguistic environment.

Publikationen

Martin Braschler; Norbert Gövert; Claus-Peter Klas (2000).

Test Results (Multilingual Searching Component, Categorisation Tool). Technischer Bericht, University of Dortmund, Computer Science 6. EuroSearch deliverable 4.1, LE4-8303

Norbert Fuhr; Norbert Gövert; Mounia Lalmas; Fabrizio Sebastiani (1999).

Categorisation tool, final prototype. Technischer Bericht, University of Dortmund, Computer Science 6. EuroSearch deliverable 4.1, LE4-8303

Norbert Gövert; Mounia Lalmas; Norbert Fuhr (1999).

A probabilistic description-oriented approach for categorising Web documents. In CIKM:99

Norbert Fuhr; Norbert Gövert; Mounia Lalmas; Fabrizio Sebastiani (1998).

Categorisation Specification. Technischer Bericht, University of Dortmund, Computer Science 6. EuroSearch deliverable 4.1, LE4-8303

Norbert Fuhr; Norbert Gövert; Mounia Lalmas; Fabrizio Sebastiani (1998).

Probabilistic Indexing and Categorisation Tool, Intermediate Prototype. Technischer Bericht, University of Dortmund, Computer Science 6. EuroSearch deliverable 4.2, LE4-8303

N. Gövert, M. Lalmas, N. Fuhr (1999). A probabilistic description-oriented approach for categorising Web documents. In: Proceedings of the 9th international conference on information and knowledge management. ACM, New York.

Klas, Claus-Peter (1999). Ein neuer, effektiver Ansatz zur Kategorisierung von Web Dokumenten. In: Heuer, A. (ed.). Proceedings ADI'99 (Agenten - Datenbanken - Information Retrieval).

Klas, Claus-Peter; Fuhr, Norbert (2000). A new Effective Approach for Categorizing Web Documents. In: Proceedings of the 22th BCS-IRSG Colloquium on IR Research.

Ingo Frommholz (2001). Categorizing Web Documents in Hierarchical Catalogues. In: Proceedings ECIR '01.