The Software Deliverable
The software completed by the conclusion of the Cilks project comprises:
- the thesaurus navigation system, developed
with Oracle Forms3,
- a program to transmit a file of thesaurus terms across the network
to Okapi,
- a GUI-based program which:
- gives users a choice of method for query
enhancement,
- submits the enhanced query to Okapi,
- generates and display a hitlist,
- displays documents, and accepts relevance
judgements,
- transmits relevance judgements back to the Oracle database for
logging and later analysis.
We thus have a completely automated system for logging and analysing
user behaviour during thesaurus navigation and query enhancement, and for
evaluating different ways of adding thesaurus terms to an original query.
The principle of using a relational database to log and analyse
all interactions during the retrieval process has now been
adopted for all current and future Okapi projects.
At present the Oracle (thesaurus) database and the Okapi (document)
database are situated on two different machines - the software written to
communicate between them uses remote procedure calls. This
development provided useful experience in distributed processing, pending
the adoption of a more general client-server architecture in future
versions of Okapi.
