Provider Selection--Design and Implementation of the Medoc Broker

  • Citation-Key:
    Dreger/etal:98b
  • Title:
    Provider Selection--Design and Implementation of the Medoc Broker
  • Author(s):
    M. Dreger
    N. Fuhr
    K. Großjohann
    S. Lohrum
  • In:
    • Citation-Key:
      Barth/etal:98
    • Title:
      Digital Libraries in Computer Science: The MeDoc Approach
    • Author(s):
      A. Barth
      M. Breu
      A. Endres
      A. de Kemp
    • Publisher:
      Springer
    • In:
      Digital Libraries in Computer Science: The MeDoc Approach
    • Year:
      1998
    Classification(s):
    J.1, H.2.6, I.7, C.2, I.4.1, E.4.5
    BibTeX entry
  • Chapter(s):
    II: Design Considerations of the MeDoc System
  • Page(s):
    67--78
  • 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.
BibTeX entry