A Framework for Structured Search of Distributed Research Resources

摘要

Search engines are powerful tools to retrieve information. However, most searches require knowing the vocabulary of the search space to locate the needed resources. Researchers usually use the vocabulary of their discipline to locate such resources, but resources indirectly related to their research often involve vocabularies outside of their field. If the relationships among these disciplines are known, the new vocabularies can be learned, but the fast pace of new research makes it very difficult for a researcher to know what vocabularies to learn. We propose a new framework that represents resources as concepts represented within a resource, forming a searchable concept space. As resources are added to the framework, the concept space will be further defined. Known or discovered relationships can be documented as well. This framework thus provides the foundation for a search mechanism that locates resources by matching concepts from the search rather than through keywords or other vocabulary-defined information.