On distributed information retrieval in virtual enterprises

A new emerging area of research and technological development, set forward by the requirements of today's progressive industries, is the paradigm of virtual organisations. A meta-data repository is the logical place for uniformly retaining and managing corporate knowledge within or across different members of such organisations. Many meta-data architectures are not optimized for information retrieval purposes. Taking into consideration the existence of different data types and attributes, many problems arise when we try to successfully merge search results from heterogeneous sources. Motivated by these observations, this paper investigates a new architecture that can support multiple meta-data abstractions and that is readily extensible. Modularity and extensibility are the design emphases.