Making use of hypertext links when retrieving information

Abstract

Hypermedia links were invented to support the manual browsing through large hypertext or hypermedia collections. However, retrieving specific portions of information in such a collection cannot be achieved by browsing only retrieval mechanisms are necessary. In this paper we show how to use the semantic content of hypertext links for retrieval. We presimt speeial purpose indexing and retrieval algorithms that exploit the node and link content. First retrieval results in a hypertext test colle&ion are presented the results are clearly better than those obtained when the links are ignored. The hope is that these results can be extended to hypermedia information and that they w be improved by more sophisticated indexing algorithms.