Abstract
Pharos: A Scalable Distributed Architecture for LocatingHeterogeneous Information Sources
by: R. Dolin, D. Agrawal, L. Dillon, and A. El Abbadi
Abstract:
This paper presents the design of Pharos: a scalable distributed architecturefor locating heterogeneous information sources. The system incorporates ahierarchical metadata structure into a multi-level retrieval system. Queriesare resolved through an iterative decision-making process. The first stepretrieves coarse-grain metadata, about all sources, stored on local, massivelyreplicated, high-level servers. Further steps retrieve more detailed metadata,about a greatly reduced set of sources, stored on remote, sparsely replicated,topic-based mid-level servers. We describe the structure, distribution, andretrieval of the metadata in Pharos to enable users to locate desirableinformation sources over the Internet.
Keywords:
resource discovery, metadata, information retrieval, automaticclassification, information taxonomies, indexing, distributedsystems
Date:
July 1996
Document: 1996-05
