Grid-enabled chinese natural language-based information retrieval system in digital museum

Information retrieval (IR) system plays an important role in many web applications such as digital library, digital museum and so on. On the aspect of querying process, most of the existing IR systems are based on keyword query. This type of query requires users to describe their query request by using keywords. But, common users prefer using natural language to express their request. So, natural language-based (especially Chinese natural language-based) IR system is proposed in this paper. At present, most traditional IR systems are single data source oriented and always centralized. Grid is chosen to enable the coordinated use of distributed resources. All the algorithms are encapsulated into services and are effectively shared.