Provider Selection--Design and Implementation of the Medoc Broker
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- Citation-Key:
- Dreger/etal:98b
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- Title:
- Provider Selection--Design and Implementation of the Medoc Broker
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- Author(s):
- M. Dreger
- N. Fuhr
- K. Großjohann
- S. Lohrum
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- In:
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- Citation-Key:
- Barth/etal:98
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- Title:
- Digital Libraries in Computer Science: The MeDoc Approach
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- Author(s):
- A. Barth
- M. Breu
- A. Endres
- A. de Kemp
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- Publisher:
- Springer
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- In:
- Digital Libraries in Computer Science: The MeDoc Approach
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- Year:
- 1998
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- Chapter(s):
- II: Design Considerations of the MeDoc System
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- Page(s):
- 67--78
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- Year:
- 1998
Abstract:
One of the objectives of the Medoc system is transparent searching in heterogeneous distributed bibliographic and full text databases (information providers). For a sufficiently large number of information providers and automatic method for provider selection becomes necessary. We take a decision-theoretic approach: we estimate the cost for retrieving n relevant documents from each provider, then choose the combination which minimizes total costs. The main cost factor is the total number of relevant documents in each database; additional factors are the retrieval quality of the database, the costs for retrieving a document from the database, and the user-specific costs for retrieving a non-relevant or a relevant document, respectively. In this paper, we also describe a first implementation of this approach where each factor is made explicit so that the implementation can easily be adapted for specific situations.