L’anté-Serveur: A Smart Gateway

Abstract

The anté-serveur is an answer to the problem of end-user access to electronic resources: databases, library catalogs, and documentary products (videotex, internal services…). The anté-serveur is an autonomous system which automatically connects to the host and always use the same intuitive interface.

The anté-serveur is developped by the french society TRIEL, with a research agreement with the University of Caen. It actually runs in the CNUSC, in Montpellier, following a research and development contract of 6 million francs (860 000 ECU) held by the Région Languedoc Roussillon. This smart gateway is able to look for information in heterogeneous systems (professionnal hosts like Questel or ESA-IRS, videotex, library catalogs…), using different kinds of terminals (french Minitel, X11 and Sunview graphics terminals and coming soon Windows-PC’s and Mac OS).

The architecture of the anté-serveur is based on automatas exchanging messages and acting independently of each others. This architecture is a sound foundation to built an evolutive system. The central piece of the work is a linguistic analyzer which transforms any natural language request into a boolean formula. The question is then send to the host, using its proper command language, by a module getting knowledge about the database. Research strategy is based on relevance feedback. The search strategy allows to built a smart gateway without using a semantic dictionnary, like a thesaurus. But the sound linguistic basis of the anté-serveur give us the opportunity to add electronic dictionnaries as they are available. This smart gateway can be used to build thematic networks (for exemple bio-medical information) or geographical networks (metropolitan area networks for documentation purpose).