Towards a New Approach for Information Retrieval in the SemanticLIFE Digital Memory Framework

This paper presents a new approach in guiding users to formulate unambiguous queries based on their common nature of asking for information. The approach known as the "front-end approach" gives users an overview about the system data through a "virtual data component" which stores the merged metadata of data storage sources. Based on this component, users are aware of their stored data while generating requests. This approach reduces the ambiguities in users' requests at very early stage; and this makes the query refinement process easily fulfill users' demands