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finding out the corresponding contact persons on her own was a very challenging
task. The faster method to find the information she was looking for was to search for
the information herself in the intranet.
“Berry picking indeed,” she thought. Her city's intranet was rather large and find-
ing the right informationwas quite time-consuming. Being a rather conservativework
environment, they did not possess a fancy content management system that allowed
for a structured organization of divisions or projects. Instead, their IT infrastructure
had grown over the years, resulting in multiple file servers where information was
stored rather uncoordinated. Each division in the administration had implemented
their own internal guidelines on how to store and share their data in the intranet.
Suzanne knew her own department's guidelines well enough to find the information
she needed in a relatively short time. But searching on other departments' network
drives sometimes appeared to be “Mission Impossible.” To make things even worse,
task forces consisting of employees from different authorities followed their own
agenda when storing their files. If only there was a central system that would assist
her in finding her way in this file server jungle…
4.1 Introduction
Enterprise environments such as the one described in the preceding scenario are very
common. In almost every company, data are created, processed, and accessed on
a daily basis. With the introduction of the computer in the workspace, the amount
of digital documents increases even further. These digital documents come in many
different formats. It can be textual documents (e.g., word or pdf documents), emails,
images, graphics, or many other proprietary formats.
In most companies, the data can be stored in many different locations or repos-
itories such as file servers, web pages, databases, email servers, and many others.
Given this distributed file storage and given the heterogeneous nature of the informa-
tion, finding the right information, also referred to as the information gathering task,
can be challenging. In the preceding scenario, Suzanne has to use many different
native search facilities such as the search function of her email client or the search
mask of the department's internal Wiki to find the information she is looking for.
This approach of manually querying each repository is only possible though when
the user knows about the actual existence of the resource. The more resources and
repositories are available, the more likely it is that users might not be able to find the
right documents.
According to Hawking et al. [ 15 ], different approaches can be used to realize
an enterprise search system. The approaches differ in how data gathering for the
indexing process is achieved. The choice of these approaches depends on different
factors, such as network bandwidth, geographical locations, and/or repository sizes.
These approaches considerably influence how search queries are processed in an
enterprise search system. One approach is to introduce a search engine that includes
all available repositories that can be found within an enterprise. Using this approach,
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