Associative information access using DualNAVI

DualNAVI is an information retrieval system which provides users with rich interaction both in document space and in word space. Its dual view interface always returns the retrieved results in two views: a list of titles for document space and "Topic Word Graph" for word space. They are lightly coupled with their cross-reference relation, and inspire users for further interaction. DualNAVI supports two kinds of search facilities, document associative search and keyword associative search, both of them are similarity based search from given items as a query. The dual view provides a natural interface to invoke these two search functions. The associative calculation for measuring similarity among documents or words is the computational basis of the effective information access with DualNAVI. The two-stage approach in the associative search is the key to the efficiency of DualNAVI. It also facilitates content-based correlation among databases which are maintained independently and distributively.