Design and Implementation of a Hypertext-based Information Retrieval System

Abstract

Information Retrieval (IR), which is also known as text or document retrieval, is the process of locating and retrieving documents that are relevant to the user queries. In hypertext environments, document databases are organized as a network of nodes which are interconnected by various types of links. This study introduces a hypertext-based text retrieval system, HypIR. In HypIR, the semantic relationships among documents are obtained using a clustering algorithm. A new approach providing the advantages of system maps and history list is introduced to prevent the user from being lost in the IR hyperspace. The paper presents the underlying concepts and implementation details. HypIR is based on the object-oriented paradigm of Hypercard.