Browsing local and global information

Current World Wide Web browsers, e.g., Mosaic and Netscape, support users primarily in the task of browsing the Internet. In some situations, users want to explore topics for which relevant informationmay reside both on a large local database and on the Web. The MultiSurf project seeks to deal with these situations by integrating text browsing of a local database with hypertext browsing of the Web. In the current implementation, local queries are passed to Web index server(s) for simultaneous search on the Internet. An index server matches query terms with remote documents. Local and remote information is then presented to the user in separate windows. The existence of index servers is made transparent to the user. Instead of opening the URL of a server explicitly and lling the form, users click on the keywords of interest in the text. MultiSurf composes these keywords into queries and passes them to the index servers. In addition to (hyper)text browsing, MultiSurf also supports visualization of the conceptual structure of a query session. This paper will describe our earlier work on text browsing and its adaptation to Web browsing. We will also discuss early impressions of the MultiSurf prototype and its functionality. We will comment on how MultiSurf ts into our overall goal of developing large-scale information exploration systems. Finally, we will describe a research strategy for integrating disparate systems through innovative user interfaces.