An Integrated Approach to the Electronic Library of the Future: Connecting a Document Retrieval System with a Hypertext System

To improve today's online document retrieval systems, it seems sensible to aim at a direct display of complete documents instead of bibliographic references only. Doing this, it is also desirable to enhance the system environment in order to support various types of search strategies within the documents themselves. Advanced hypertext systems implement a large portion of such search tools. However, the manual e ort to transfer a conventional linear document into hypertext form makes the hypertext conversion of large libraries look unrealistic. To overcome this problem, we propose the automatic conversion of given linear documents into a hypertext web. This can be done by combining hypertext generation methods with information retrieval methods in order to decrease the complexity of the generation process. After the hypertext generation, the hypertext web may be entered by means of a document retrieval system and examined either as a whole or restricted to regions de ned by the user's initial query.