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Motivation

Our CSCW approach intends to supply tools for the generation of links between the nodes created by the group. To accomplish this, we implemented an information retrieval mechanism to facilitate link authoring, in addition to the already mentioned awareness mechanisms. The main inspiration for this work was the frustration felt sometimes on looking for information on WWW. Since information is entered in the Web by different people, the amount of information is massive, and it is difficult to create efficient links between work done by different people. Currently there are many mechanisms on the web that help searching for information. Each of them address the problem in a different way, since there is no common way of documenting the contents of a site (as in ftp/Archie) or a comprehensive registry of sites (as in gopher). Amongst them we can cite:

These are just few examples, there are many others. We decided to insert in our system something different to see the results. Of course in our case, the number of nodes and links is not comparable to the number existing in the web, but we think that the solution is scalable. Basically, we provide a mechanism to calculate possible destinations given a source anchor and a node. Next section will give more details about the mentioned mechanism.



next up previous
Next: Implementation Up: Information retrieval Previous: Information retrieval



Fri Dec 8 14:41:14 GMT 1995