Personal Library

Researchers are now beginning to use tools that allow them to retrieve relevant documents from the large and ever-growing volumes of scientific information spread throughout the Internet. Once these documents are gathered or identified, researchers still need help organizing, managing, and sharing their finds with their collaborators. Currently, no tools are available to help researchers manage the complexity of their personal research results and associated files, and provide easy ways to organize, locate, and share the results of their research. It would be very useful if researchers could add annotations to the search results, so that they could later locate and identify important features of the document. This project will develop, test, and implement key components of a personal library to store, organize, manage, and share the results of federated searches. Relational data management techniques will be introduced to help manage search results and help researchers organize documents according to the key ideas and relationships embedded in the documents. The focus will be on organization techniques for enabling quicker access to the most relevant domain-specific technical literature. Commercial Applications and other Benefits as described by the awardee: The personal library should find use in professional research organizations, such as the R&D divisions of commercial companies that have an increasing need to better organize the large and growing volume of research results. It would improve the effectiveness of large scale distributed research and collaboration, accelerate the research process, and improve the quality and utility of research results