Toward information retrieval Web services for digital libraries

Information retrieval (IR) functions serve a critical role in many digital library systems. There are numerous mature IR algorithms that have been implemented and it would be a waste of resources and time to reimplement them. The implemented IR algorithms can be distributed or their functions made available through the framework of Web services. Web services in the IR domain have not been widely tested. Concept extraction is an important area in traditional IR. We demonstrated that it can be easily adopted as IR Web services and can be accessed in multiple ways. For the IR Web services, we take advantage of a term representation database which was created as a result of a previous digital library project containing 31,928,892 terms found on 49,602,191 pages of the Web.