Because of the close collaboration between ADL and a number of leading commercial database suppliers, the new project aims to use these established channels of communication to convey the ideas and results generated in the project directly into the commercial database sector. We have also developed a first version of an interactive display and analysis tool designed to aid the study of indexing functionality and performance. It is too early in the life of the project to assess the success of its primary objectives. There have, however, already been a number of interesting and unforeseen developments arising from the synergy between the project and the Alexandria Digital Library. ADL is a library of spatially referenced information, its collection consisting primarily of maps, aerial photographs and satellite remote sensing images.
Users can search the library by specifying relevant object types in a defined geographical area.
Very often, they would like to restrict the results of queries to a scale proportional to the geographical scale of the query region. For example, a query of political boundaries within the whole American continent might be limited to national rather than state or county boundaries. Or a population query might return only centers of population exceeding 100,000 people. As far as we are aware, there is no available commercial database support for these kinds of scaleable queries and, until now, there has been little or no research on the problem. Text retrieval ADL requires the closest and most efficient possible integration of text retrieval and database query support.