Integrated Information Retrieval in a Knowledge Worker Support System

This paper describes the design of the information retrieval facilities of an integrated information system called EUROMATH. EUROMATH is an example of a Knowledge Worker Support System: it has been designed specifically to support mathematicians in their research work. EUROMATH is required to provide uniform retrieval facilities for searching in a user's personal data, in a shared database of structured documents and in public, bibliographic databases. The design of information retrieval facilities that satisfy these and other requirements posed several interesting design issues regarding the integration of various retrieval techniques. As well as a uniform query language, designed to be highly usable by the target user group, the retrieval facilities provide expert intermediary functions, i.e. sophisticated support for the retrieval of bibliographic data. This support is achieved using a model of the user, a model of the user's information need and a set of search strategies based on those used by human intermediaries. The expert intermediary facilities include extensive help facilities, automatic query reformulation and browsing of a variety of sources of query terms.