INTERNATIONAL SOCIETY FOR PHOTOGRAMMETRY AND REMOTE SENSING
Commission VI
Symposium held in Mainz, FR Germany, 22 - 25 September 1982
SOFTWARE FOR INFORMATION RETR I EVAL
Dr. Wolf-Dietmar Oberhoff,
IBM Deutschland, Stuttgart, FR Germany
ABSTRACT
The ever increasing production of information (information explosion) re-
quires adequate methods of using the processing speed and data storage
capacity of electronic data processing equipment.
STAIRS/VS is a terminal orientated, multi-user, online dialog-system for
storing and retrieving documents. Machine readable documents are indexed
automatically by analyzing the formatted and unformatted fields(text). The
user retrieves documents from data bases according to specified search
questions including keywords and context-information and/or by selecting
years, authors, journals out of the formatted fields.
Information retrieval involves looking for an information located somewhere
in a mass of data. The "Storage and Information Retrieval System / Virtual
Storage (STAIRS/VS)" is a tool for allocating an information having been
stored in a computer. The following is a short outline of STAIRS/VS. For
details, reference is made to the booklet "General Information GH 12-5114-5".
1. Features of STAIRS/VS for data base creation
The functions for data base creation and maintenance are performed online
or by utility programs that run in batch mode without any interaction with
the online system. This performance requires four steps:
1. Creation of a Text data set from original documents and of Text Index
data set containing formatted data. This includes listing significant words
and their occurrence. The user can specify paragraphs and words to be
excluded from the data base.
2. Sorting significant words and associated occurrences.
3. Analysis of significant words to produce a unique-words file.
4. Creation of a Dictionary and an occurrence file.
The software organises four data bases (Fig. 1). Each data base contains
the following data sets.
1. Text data set
This data set contains the text documents in a form similar to their
printed or displayed form.
2. Text Index data set
A data set that points to the documents in the text data set. The Text
Index also contains formatted fields for each document. The formatted
fields are used for keyword searching (SELECT function) and for sorting
result strings.
*
Note of Editor:
There are certainly quite a few most effective software packages in operation.
As a sample case, we had invited a speaker to report on a software being
used in several countries.
Bibliographic quotation :
Oberhoff, W.D. : Software for information retrieval. In: Int. Archive of Photo-
grammetry, 24 - VI, pp 68-75, Mainz 1982
