Towards Mapping-Based Document Retrieval in Heterogeneous Digital Libraries

In many scientific domains, researchers depend on a timely and efficient access to available publications in their particular area. The increasing availability of publications in electronic form via digital libraries is a reaction to this need. A remaining problem is the fact that the pool of all available publications is distributed between different libraries. In order to increase the availability of information, these different libraries should be linked in such a way, that all the information is available via any one of them. Peer-to-peer technologies provide sophisticated solutions for this kind of loose integration of information sources. In our work, we consider digital libraries that organize documents according to a dedicated classification hierarchy or provide access to information on the basis of a thesaurus. These kinds of access mechanisms have proven to increase the retrieval result and are therefore widely used. On the other hand, this causes new problems as different sources will use different classifications and thesauri to organize information. This means, that we have to be able to mediate between these different structures. Integrating this mediation into the information retrieval process is a problem that to the best of our knowledge has not been addressed before.