Concept Linking for Information Integration in Open Book and Sentinel

Opening up large amounts of loosely structured information for easy access and use is a complex problem. This paper describes two systems that address different aspects of the problem, but which use common technology and similar underlying principles. Open Book is a web-based newsletter, which automatically links stories with each other, and with database information. Sentinel is an email archiving and pro-active search tool, which weaves email dialog and related documents into a web of story content. Both use a story-based approach to information linking, using genrebased information extraction and semantic networks.