Chapter – 8 Consumer search and Resource discovery

Consumer search and Resource discovery

1) Explain WAIS (wide area information service engine).

Ans: – Wide Area Information Service (WAIS) Engine:

  • The program Wide Area Information Service or WAIS (pronounced ways) enables users to search the contents of files for any string of text that they supply. – An extremely versatile service, WAIS uses an English-languages query front end to a large mixed collection of databases that contain text based documents.

What does WAIS do?

WAIS lets users search the full text of all the documents on a server. Users on different platforms can access personal, company and published information from one interface-text, pictures, and voice or formatted documents.

How does WAIS work?

The servers take a user’s question and do their best to find relevant documents. The user then enters a query, which can be a list of keywords or even sentences in plain English.

  • After entering the search string and the target database, the user specifies the maximum number of hits WAIS can return for a given query.

Search Engine: WAIS is a sophisticated search engine. The purpose of a search engine in any indexing system is simple: to find every item that matches a query.

2) What is Information filtering? What are the typical features of the filtering process?

Ans : – Information Filtering:

  • Information Filtering describes a variety of processes involving the delivery of information to people who need it.
  • This technology is needed as the rapid accumulation of information in electronic databases makes it necessary that consumers and organizations rely on computing methods to filter and take required information.
  • To distinguish information filtering from searching, the necessity to list the filtering process steps arises:

i) Filtering systems involve a large volume of data. ii) Filtering involves removal of data from an incoming stream, rather than finding data in that stream.

  • Filtering access the information that comes as a result of a search query.
  • Filtering is based on descriptions of individual or group information, preferences often called profiles.
  • Filtering systems deals primarily with textual information.