The Centre for Interactive Systems Research was established in 1987 by its current Director, Professor Stephen Robertson. Its research activities have focused on:

• The design, implementation, testing and operational evaluation of probabilistic retrieval methods, involving term weighting, document ranking, relevance feedback, query expansion and passage retrieval.
• Investigations of information-seeking behaviour, and the application of HCI principles to the retrieval process, including user interface design.
• Evaluation methodologies for interactive systems: user centred methods and system performance measures, techniques for transaction logging and analysis.
• Distributed client-server architectures and communication protocols for networked information retrieval systems.
• Knowledge representation and knowledge-based structures for retrieval and thesaurus navigation.
• Computer-based support for humanities research.

CISR Projects have been funded principally by the British Library; also by the Higher Education Funding Council, The Wellcome Trust, The Pilgrim Trust and the European Community. The Centre has also obtained some funding from commercial organisations and from paid consultancy work.

Most projects have been based on the OKAPI experimental IR system, which has served as a platform for research into probabilistic retrieval algorithms, distributed system architectures, and user interface design. Other smaller-scale projects undertaken in CISR have included: indexing the Athenaeum, evaluating the SOCKER kernel software, and constructing an internal Web site for the Parliamentary Counsel Office

Current Okapi-based projects are:

• Combining Corpus Linguistics with the Probabilistic Model for Information Retrieval
• Participation in the Tools for Innovative Publishing in Science (Information Society Technologies Program)

A packaged version of Okapi is available for use by other academic researchers. For details please see the Okapi-Pack documentation.

Last updated: August 2000
By: Susan Jones
sa386@city.ac.uk