Workshop A: Web-wide Indexing/Semantic Header or Cover Page

Chair: Bipin C. Desai, Brian Pinkerton

Chris Dodge My name is Chris Dodge, and I work as a postdoc. research scientist in the computer centre of the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research (AWI) in Germany. Part of my job here has been to set up our WWW server (at http://www.awi-bremerhaven.de/), and in my role as "Webmaster" here, I've become interested in Web indexing and resource discovery. Many scientists at the AWI are somewhat sceptical about the benefits that the Web can provide for the academic community, and in some quarters here, the take up of Web usage has been very slow. Part of the problem is that the apparent signal to noise ratio is too low when people try and find information relevant to their field. In an attempt to help our scientists track down interesting information, I have setup a database of documents related to polar, marine and global change research, based on automatic scanning of our proxy server cache. I am presenting a paper on this at the conference, titled: "Web Cataloguing Through Cache Exploitation and Steps Towards Consistency Maintenance". One problem with any list or catalogue of Web resources is that changes on the Web can mean that the lists/catalouges can become out of date. Part of my work includes attempts at the creation of mechanisms to prevent this. My current attitude towards this work is that while it has been reasonably successful, by itself, it does not appear to provide a very complete list of information on the Web related to polar and marine research. I think that maybe this cache scanning mechanism, in combination with other searching mechanisms, would provide a more complete database. A further problem is in the identification of appropriate Web documents; in the AWI database it is estimated that at least 27% of the database entries are of no relevance to polar and marine research.