This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed proceedings of the 7th International Workshop of the Initiative for the Evaluation of XML Retrieval, INEX 2008, held at Dagstuhl Castle, Germany, in December 2008. The aim of the INEX 2008 workshop was to bring together researchers who participated in the INEX 2008 campaign. Over the year leading up to the event, participating organizations contributed to the building of a large-scale XML test collection by creating topics, performing retrieval runs, and providing relevance assessments. The workshop concluded the results of this large-scale effort, summarized and addressed the issues encountered, and devised a work plan for the future evaluation of XML retrieval systems. The 49 papers included in this volume report the final results of INEX 2008. They have been divided into sections according to the seven tracks of the workshop, investigating various aspects of XML retrieval, from book search to entity ranking, including interaction aspects.

These proceedings contain the refereed papers and posters presented at the ?rst Information Retrieval Facility Conference (IRFC), which was held in Vienna on 31 May 2010. The conference provides a multi-disciplinary, scienti?c forum that aims to bring young researchers into contact with industry at an early stage. IRFC 2010 received 20 high-quality submissions, of which 11 were accepted and appear here. The decision whether a paper was presented orally or as poster was solely based on what we thought was the most suitable form of communi- tion, considering we had only a single day for the event. In particular, the form of presentation bears no relation to the quality of the accepted papers, all of which were thoroughly peer reviewed and had to be endorsed by at least three independent reviewers. The Information Retrieval Facility (IRF) is an open IR research institution, managedby a scienti?c board drawnfrom a panel of internationalexperts in the ?eldwhoseroleistopromotethehighestqualityintheresearchsupportedbythe facility. As a non-pro?t research institution, the IRF provides services to IR s- ence in the form of a reference laboratory,hardwareand softwareinfrastructure. Committed to Open Science concepts, the IRF promotes publication of recent scienti?c results and newly developed methods, both in traditional paper form and as data sets freely available to IRF members. Such transparency ensures objective evaluation and comparabilityof results and consequently diversity and sustainability of their further development.

Recent technological progress in computer science, Web technologies, and the constantly evolving information available on the Internet has drastically changed the landscape of search and access to information. Current search engines employ advanced techniques involving machine learning, social networks, and semantic analysis. Next Generation Search Engines: Advanced Models for Information Retrieval is intended for scientists and decision-makers who wish to gain working knowledge about search in order to evaluate available solutions and to dialogue with software and data providers. The book aims to provide readers with a better idea of the new trends in applied research.

Documents usually have a content and a structure. The content refers to the text of the document, whereas the structure refers to how a document is logically organized. An increasingly common way to encode the structure is through the use of a mark-up language. Nowadays, the most widely used mark-up language for representing structure is the eXtensible Mark-up Language (XML). XML can be used to provide a focused access to documents, i.e. returning XML elements, such as sections and paragraphs, instead of whole documents in response to a query. Such focused strategies are of particular benefit for information repositories containing long documents, or documents covering a wide variety of topics, where users are directed to the most relevant content within a document. The increased adoption of XML to represent a document structure requires the development of tools to effectively access documents marked-up in XML. This book provides a detailed description of query languages, indexing strategies, ranking algorithms, presentation scenarios developed to access XML documents. Major advances in XML retrieval were seen from 2002 as a result of INEX, the Initiative for Evaluation of XML Retrieval. INEX, also described in this book, provided test sets for evaluating XML retrieval effectiveness. Many of the developments and results described in this book were investigated within INEX. Table of Contents: Introduction / Basic XML Concepts / Historical Perspectives / Query Languages / Indexing Strategies / Ranking Strategies / Presentation Strategies / Evaluating XML Retrieval Effectiveness / Conclusions

With the advancements of semantic web, ontology has become the crucial mechanism for representing concepts in various domains. For research and dispersal of customized healthcare services, a major challenge is to efficiently retrieve and analyze individual patient data from a large volume of heterogeneous data over a long time span. This requirement demands effective ontology-based information retrieval approaches for clinical information systems so that the pertinent information can be mined from large amount of distributed data. This unique and groundbreaking book highlights the key advances in ontology-based information retrieval techniques being applied in the healthcare domain and covers the following areas: Semantic data integration in e-health care systems Keyword-based medical information retrieval Ontology-based query retrieval support for e-health implementation Ontologies as a database management system technology for medical information retrieval Information integration using contextual knowledge and ontology merging Collaborative ontology-based information indexing and retrieval in health informatics An ontology-based text mining framework for vulnerability assessment in health and social care An ontology-based multi-agent system for matchmaking patient healthcare monitoring A multi-agent system for querying heterogeneous data sources with ontologies for reducing cost of customized healthcare systems A methodology for ontology based multi agent systems development Ontology based systems for clinical systems: validity, ethics and regulation

The compendium presents the latest results of the most prominent competitions held in the field of Document Analysis and Text Recognition. It includes a description of the participating systems and the underlying methods on one hand and the datasets used together with evaluation metrics on the other hand. This volume also demonstrates with examples, how to organize a competition and how to make it successful. It will be an indispensable handbook to the document image analysis community.

This open access book covers all facets of entity-oriented search—where “search” can be interpreted in the broadest sense of information access—from a unified point of view, and provides a coherent and comprehensive overview of the state of the art. It represents the first synthesis of research in this broad and rapidly developing area. Selected topics are discussed in-depth, the goal being to establish fundamental techniques and methods as a basis for future research and development. Additional topics are treated at a survey level only, containing numerous pointers to the relevant literature. A roadmap for future research, based on open issues and challenges identified along the way, rounds out the book. The book is divided into three main parts, sandwiched between introductory and concluding chapters. The first two chapters introduce readers to the basic concepts, provide an overview of entity-oriented search tasks, and present the various types and sources of data that will be used throughout the book. Part I deals with the core task of entity ranking: given a textual query, possibly enriched with additional elements or structural hints, return a ranked list of entities. This core task is examined in a number of different variants, using both structured and unstructured data collections, and numerous query formulations. In turn, Part II is devoted to the role of entities in bridging unstructured and structured data. Part III explores how entities can enable search engines to understand the concepts, meaning, and intent behind the query that the user enters into the search box, and how they can provide rich and focused responses (as opposed to merely a list of documents)—a process known as semantic search. The final chapter concludes the book by discussing the limitations of current approaches, and suggesting directions for future research. Researchers and graduate students are the primary target audience of this book. A general background in information retrieval is sufficient to follow the material, including an understanding of basic probability and statistics concepts as well as a basic knowledge of machine learning concepts and supervised learning algorithms.