Technological Context

Abstract

In this chapter software technology is discussed in the context of information retrieval. We start with a brief overview of distributed data management systems, from distributed database systems to global information systems. We also comment on the impact of new technology such as client/server architectures and the Web. Second, we introduce ontologies as the key to describing the data content of repositories. We include the rationale for using ontologies, one possible way to describe them, some examples of preexisting ontologies, some interesting issues about the design of ontologies and the mapping information that relates ontologies to data repositories, and other works that deal with ontologies but from a different or complementary point of view. Finally, we describe the main features of the most relevant works dealing with query processing in open and dynamic environments and compare them with the features that we propose for our system.