Browsing marked-up documents by traversing hyperlinks has become probably the mostimportant means by which documents are accessed, both via the World Wide Web (WWW) andorganisational Intranets. However, there is a pressing demand for document management andretrieval systems to deal appropriately with the massive number of documents available. Thereare two classes of solution: general search engines, whether for the WWW or an Intranet, whichmake little use of specific domain knowledge or hand-crafted specialised systems which arecostly to build and maintain.The aim of this thesis was to develop a document management and retrieval system suitable forsmall communities as well as individuals in specialised domains on the Web. The aim was toallow users to easily create and maintain their own organisation of documents while ensuringcontinual improvement in the retrieval performance of the system as it evolves. The systemdeveloped is based on the free annotation of documents by users and is browsed using theconcept lattice of Formal Concept Analysis (FCA). A number of annotation support tools weredeveloped to aid the annotation process so that a suitable system evolved. Experiments wereconducted in using the system to assist in finding staff and student home pages at the School ofComputer Science and Engineering, University of New South Wales.Results indicated that the annotation tools provided a good level of assistance so that documentswere easily organised and a lattice-based browsing structure that evolves in an ad hoc fashionprovided good efficiency in retrieval performance. An interesting result suggested that althoughan established external taxonomy can be useful in proposing annotation terms, users appear tobe very selective in their use of terms proposed. Results also supported the hypothesis that theconcept lattice of FCA helped take users beyond a narrow search to find other usefuldocuments. In general, lattice-based browsing was considered as a more helpful method thanBoolean queries or hierarchical browsing for searching a specialised domain.We conclude that the concept lattice of Formal Concept Analysis, supported by annotationtechniques is a useful way of supporting the flexible open management of documents requiredby individuals, small communities and in specialised domains. It seems likely that this approachcan be readily integrated with other developments such as further improvements in searchengines and the use of semantically marked-up documents, and provide a unique advantage insupporting autonomous management of documents by individuals and groups - in a way that isclosely aligned with the autonomy of the WWW.
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