By Guest Author Manfred Hauer

Dandelon.com is a public search engine for scientific books and articles. The user interface supports 27 languages and user queries are expanded by multiple thesauri in up to 25 languages. The content is a combination of bibliographic data generated by libraries, automatic linguistic indexing and table of contents and some whole texts of articles or books. The combination of scanned tables of content, broad linguistic indexing, extensive use of multilingual thesauri (synonyms, translations and narrower terms – all written or imported into IC INDEX) and relevance ranking opens a new level of library searching. The 1.7 million thesaurus entries are visible as a Flash application in the “dictionaries” section.

The collection is currently growing by about 2500 books and 2000 articles per week; in January 2009 there are about 550.000 books and 600.000 articles. In 2008, 750.000 queries were typed in at first page.

Originally “dandelon.com” was designed for demonstrating the power of “intelligentCAPTURE mobile”, which is a high integrated station for scanning table of contents, articles etc., doing OCR and machine indexing
and communicates with major library management systems. It also captures ONIX, MARC and SWETS data provided by publishers and periodical agencies.

Some libraries do not share their content with dandelon.com and just buy data generated by intelligentCAPTURE like Library of Congress, British Library, German National library.

Technically “dandelon.com” is based on IBM Lotus Domino server with the build in GTR search engine and intelligentCAPTURE is based on IBM Lotus Notes client. Each user query is analyzed for best match with thesauri
entries; e.g., three words typed in by the user may generate a query of up to 20 or 100 final search terms. It is running on one SUN server and replies to about 1 million clicks per month. “dandelon.com” is a service
of AGI – Information Management Consultants.

Similar applications are in use for searching for parliamental documents and for the website of a public administration of “Vorarlberg” in Austria.

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