An expert system to aid cataloging and searching electronic documents on digital libraries

This paper describes a metadata based indexing system with a built-in expert system for cataloging and searching digital libraries on the World Wide Web. The specific features of this system are the following: An expert system with a knowledge base and a subject thesaurus, a model of a reference librarian's behavior for cataloging and searching, and an intelligent user interface to provide context sensitive help to the user. At present our expert system is limited to the subjects of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering. The design issues and the implementation details of the expert system to mimic a librarian's behavior for automated document searching and cataloging are discussed in detail.