[Web4lib] Federated Search Advise

[Dimple Mohan]

I recently joined this list in the hope of finding answers to some of my
non-librarian background related questions. I am a web project manager
with a strong focus on information organization ( they call us
information architects a buzz word that really came out of the whole
information sciences background, something I learnt in my novice
conversations with librarians). I have a client that has a Special
Library catered to their research staff. They just bought Sydney Plus
license as a federated search tool to help their researchers. While the
library has experienced staff on board they are seeking my help to
suggest and develop useful thesauri and controlled vocabularies to help
enhance the tool. One of the features of Sydney Plus that I thought was
great was using ontologies to further enhance and narrow down
information that researchers can find from these different federated
databases.

Any examples of how you may have adopted this tool to meet your needs,
applied ontologies or topic maps to help search, anything that can help
me as a non-librarian to provide that help and support to my client
would be much appreciated!

An option is that you may reply to me directly and I can summarize for
the list.