Future enhancements for full text databases

Abstract

It has taken about twenty years to develop and implement the wide range of public databases offered via host services today. In most cases the information available is bibliographic, factual or numeric, but full text databases are becoming more and more important. To improve their services, some vendors have added sophisticated graphics and front end features to their bibliographic and numeric databases. These improvements have been applied both at the host site, with the host systems handling the bulk of data and graphics processing, and to PC and workstation software, where sophisticated graphics and text processing packages adapted to host‐specific output formats are required. Future developments are expected in three main areas: (1) host based menu‐driven systems which do not require sophisticated user hardware; (2) menu and front end interfaces on gateway and mailbox services which allow easy access to many databases, albeit with limited search capabilities; (3) PC or front end computer based systems which already have good retrieval interaction and input/output processing features, but require more expensive hardware and software at the user's site. In the future, PC based systems are expected to utilise expert systems, both to support the retrieval of information online and to enhance the quality of the retrieved information by sophisticated post‐processing features. The developments in user support features and advanced search input/output environments which have hitherto been implemented for non full text databases now need to be introduced to enhance full text retrieval.