The initial services provided by the system include topical browse, query routing, and search. The BIS provides a topical browse service by managing the fixed taxonomy of topics as well as the topics generated as a result of utilizing clustering techniques. The BIS also manages document summary information, which had been generated as a result of the classification process in the GDS, and provides the query routing capability by determining which Harvest Brokers to search as the user browses the topical information space. This is accomplished by means of a table which lists the association between Brokers and the topical categories they manage. Harvest Brokers provide a full-text search capability, enabling a user to issue a query containing a Boolean expression of keywords and then receive a list of documents.
All documents retrieved in the system reside at the information provider sites.
The system is designed to support a wide range of post-retrieval tools to help users process information after it is retrieved. The main services provided include document summarization and abstracting. Processing documents with a POS-tagger allows us to abstract and summarize based on parts of speech. In the initial capability, a tagged document can be filtered for verb and noun forms thereby reducing the word volume for the document. We eliminate common verb forms to avoid biasing results.