System for Organizing and Accessing Web Resources using faceted Indexing

Abstract

Organizing and providing access to the resources on the internet has been a problem area in spite of the availability of sophisticated search engines and other software tools. There have been several attempts to organize the resources on the WWW. Some of them have tried to use traditional Library Classification Schemes such as the Library of Congress Classification, the Dewey Decimal Classification and others. However there is a need to assign proper subject headings to them and present them in a logical or hierarchical sequence to cater to the need for browsing. This paper attempts to describe an experimental system designed to organize and provide access to web documents using a faceted pre-coordinate indexing system based on the Deep Structure Indexing System (DSIS) derived from POPSI (POstulate based Permuted Subject Indexing) of Bhattacharya, and the facet analysis and chain indexing system of Ranganathan. A prototype software system has been designed to create a database of records specifying Web documents according to the Dublin Core and input a faceted subject heading according to DSIS. Synonymous terms are added to the standard terms in the heading using appropriate symbols. Once the data is entered along with a description and URL of the Web document, the record is stored in the system. More than one faceted subject heading can be assigned to a record depending on the content of the original document. The system stores the surrogates and keeps the faceted subject headings separately after establishing a link. Search is carried out on index entries derived from the faceted subject heading using chain indexing technique. If a single term is input, the system searches for its presence in the faceted subject headings and displays the subject headings in a sorted sequence reflecting an organizing sequence. If the number of retrieved headings is too large (running into more than a page) then the user has the option of entering another search term to be searched in combination. The system searches subject headings already retrieved and look for those containing the second term. The retrieved faceted subject headings can be displayed and browsed. When the relevant subject heading is selected the system displays the records with their URLs. Using the URL the original document on the web can be accessed. The prototype system developed under Windows NT environment using ASP and web server is under rigorous testing. The database and indexes management routines need further development.