Subject: [[email-masked]: The ILIAD Knowledge Robot]

From: Bob Jackson <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 13 Oct 94 11:26:57 EDT

Unfortunately the ILIAD tool appears to only look
at WAIS indices and then only
at the contents of the <dbname>.src file,
which is not a good measure of the actual
index contents.

I think HARVEST is a better approach.

---

From: dwells (Don Wells)
Date: Thu, 13 Oct 94 11:45:20 EDT

> which is not a good measure of the actual

I talked to one of the developers. My understanding of their current
technique is that they use descriptions of Dewey codes as search
strings, and run them against a list of WAIS servers to rank the
degree of match between the contents of the indicies of the servers
(_not_ the src files) and the codes. Then a user query to their system
can be matched against the Dewey codes in order to produce a list of
appropriate servers to which the query can be submitted. This approach
only applies to WAIS servers, of course.

In principle, the Astronomy Thesaurus might provide a classifier
coding system analogous to DDC.

I have heard experienced people say that the thesaurus approach does
not work, that indexing of full text is the only reliable approach. I
have insufficient experience to judge.

 > I think HARVEST is a better approach.

Does Harvest do WAIS servers? I thought it was only looking at HTML.

-Don