Indexing and searching mechanism based mainly upon semantic attributes of documents has been showing certain limitations, and the function of the non-semantic attributes and their implication to information retrieval and system design are not yet fully explored. By summarizing the non-semantic characteristics of documents and by analyzing them in terms of information needs, information seeking and use as well, the authors attempt to explore their potentialities to information retrieval and to information system design as well.

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In the conventional information retrieval research, evaluation of information retrieval system has been performed mainly on the basis of precision and recall of final research result. However, modern retrieval systems are designed to provide results through the interaction with users. The decision by a user to stop his search is therefore influenced by the interactions done up to the point. The survey by questionnaires was conducted to clarify the factors which affect the decision of stopping a search. In the case when users stop search in unsatisfied way, many non-essential reasons are pointed out for giving up further search. The implications of the stop of a search in user behavior study are emphasized.

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　Many knowledge discovery tools have been developed using data mining, the integrating technologies of machine learging, database, statistics and others. We have been constructing "mondou" search systems based on extended association rules. In this paper, we discusse the experimental results of text mining applied for web hyper texts, INSPEC database, and magazines and articles index data in the National Diet Library. First of all, we express about the efficient strategies in order to derive association rules. Next, we discuss the relation between the threshold values and association rules, and we focus on the techniques of ROC (Reciever Operating Characteristics) graph to evaluate the characteristics of derived rules. By using the ROC convex full method, we can estimate appropriate threshold values to derive association rules for keywords.

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Development of the Internet has opened a new epoch of post-Web or post-search engine period since around 1996 - 1997. Now "portal sites" are often referred to in substitution for search engines as to indicate the main entrance to the Internet, where various types of digital contents services are being provided. The paper in the first half gives an overview to these services including issues of digital libraries, electronic publication, copyright and MP3 formatted music. The trend seems to encourage authors to make self-publication or direct marketing of their works. Though informatics is expected to give an effective future view for the development of informatized society, the analyses appear to have been superficial. The establishment of the research area in informatics including its methodology would be presently most required.

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　Analysis is made on the frequencies of the appearance of ten million key words of 1.2 million chemical articles and of 3.6 thousand terms of the typical texts of the Muromachi Renga. The former represents the literature resource of the modern science and the latter that of the classical Japanese culture. The analysis has evidenced that a logarithmic relation holds between the frequencies of the appearance of the top terms and the order of their magnitudes.
　By the nature of the logarithmic relation, the top few terms of higher frequencies dominate the total appearance of all other terms, implying that those few terms represet the whole system. The top few terms could be referred to as those of the general nature and the bottom ones as those specific. After we classify the terms into two types of the general and the specific natures, we will be able to evaluate the character of any document by counting the relative ratio of the numbers of the general terms to the specific ones. By definition, any document dominated by the terms of the general nature could be referred to as the 'soft' one.
　As further analyses are made with respect to correlations among the terms of the top, and the bottom groups of the appearance, separately, another evidence of correlation has been noticed on both groups. This finding will refer to the fact that the knowledge forms another structure of the higher order. Analogy is referred to for the structures of the universe or those of the atoms.

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　Understanding brain structure, function and its development is a main theme in the 2lst century. In Europe and U.S.A., "the Decade of the Brain" is planned and the related research activities are promoted. Also in Japan, the system has been formed and RIKEN BSI(Brain science Institute) was established in 1997 as a series of those activities.
　While researches in neuroscience are aggressively carried out in Japan, U.S.A. and Europe respectively, OECD Megascience Forum, which is promoting the international cooperation in megascience, established a Neuroinformatics Subgroup. They discuss the importance of integrating researches in neuroscience and the information technology, the necessity of the international cooperation of research in neuroscience, and also the influence of its information industry and medical field.
　Now I would like to make a presentation about Neuroinformatics - its definition, goal, measurements for development, the current movement and engaging plans in RIKEN BSI.

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　The Internet enables people to share documents written in various languages worldwide. Many documents on the Internet are provided by the WWW. Most of them are markupped with HTML tags. The tags which indicate document elements are very useful for full-text retrieval. The author considers that a full-text retrieval system for tagged multilingual documents is very important to get useful information. This article describes a multilingual full-text retrieval system for tagged documents. It has functions to store and retrieve SGML, XML, and HTML documents. The system handles character code sets both IS0-2022-JP-2 and Unicode for multilingual texts. It is developped with Java for portability. This article also discusses the performance issues of the implemented system.

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　Through a implementation of a regional IX(Internet eXchange), we plan to promote new infrastructures for information communication network in Toyama region. Some background and needs of the regional IX are discussed in this paper. In addition, some ideas of related applications utilized in the inside of this regional IX network are reported.

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　Thesauri have been widely used in bibliographic databases for 30 years. Recently, CD-ROMs of a variety of dictionaries with their GUIs are spreaded to current users. On the other hand , End users dose not use thesauri as for their bulky printed matter. The king of software browsing graphically and managing thesauri does not appear in PC environment..
　The browsing tool for lexical database with hierarchical structure has been developed using Java.. This paper describes the functions, the components, and examples of its usage. The problems of the browser and the functions to be extended are discussed.

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Along with expanding the Internet, database and information shearing services became popular network applications widely used by the public and JAVA technology made us able to develop object oriented programs for multi-platform environments. Considering the situations above, we developed a database CD-ROM using a JAVA search engine that was originally developed for WWW based services. This was done without making major modifications on the programs.

　 We have made sure that the same JAVA application can be shared among Internet users and non-Internet users. It's provided as the WWW based service for the Internet users and as the CD-ROM content for non-Internet users.

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　Geological Survey of Japan has published and dizitized many kind of geological maps. The dizitized maps are procesed on GIS(Geographical Information System) for the use of education, civil engineering, enviromental problems, mitigation or geological hazards so on.
　We developed a simple GIS software GeomapZ for viewing and analyzing geological data. GeomapZ can read data from DLG-formatted vector data files. DEM-formatted elevation data files, raster image data files in BMP/TIF, and user data in text format. It is easy to create and to print high quality geological images using GeomapZ. GeomapZ is a suitable and easy viewer particularly for publication of geological data in the way with CD-ROM.

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　Nous nous proposons d'analyser le vocabulaire specialise utilise dans les revues japonaises des beaux-arts destinees au grand public. Le vocabulaire des beaux-arts en usage aujourd'hui repose essentiellement sur la traduction de concepts occidentaux realise realize a l'ere Meiji. Mais il continue a s'accroitre de nos jours, dans la mesure ou les informations artistique en provenance de l'etranger arrivent au Japon en temps reel, et ou une partie de ces informations introduisent un vocabulaire nouveau, concernant les tendances, les techniques ou l'esthetique, qui doit etre traduit aussitot pour sa diffusion sur place.
　Il se trouve que la plupart des vocables des beaux-arts sont des mots composes. En fait, dans le lexique japonais meme, le nombre des mots composes est superieur a celui des mots simples. Nous nous demanderont quelles ont ete les methodes suivies pour exprimer les concepts occidentaux a l'aide des caracteres sino-japonais en usage au Japon. Etant donne que la frequence et la productivite varient, les neologismes de ce type se revelent complexes dans leur interpretation. En examinant cette question, nous envisagerons ia problematique de la traduction conceptuelle liee au systeme des caracteres sino-japonais et a celui des katakana, afin de relever leur correlation semantique.
　A travers divers phenomenes langagiers, nous avons fait apparaitre que les vocabulaires specialises des beaux-arts en kango et en katakana ont un point commun : les uns comme les autres presentent une structure incoherente de mots composes.

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This paper surveys page ranking factors used in the current WWW search engines, such as (1) relevance to query keywords, (2) freshness, (3) popularity, (4) citation rank and (5) page types. The relevance to query keywords have been studied in the traditional information retrieval researches. However, other factors are introduced into the WWW search engines in order to improve their ranking performance, because WWW contents are heterogeneous and changeable large-scale hypermedia. The freshness, the popularity and the citation rank are the factors introduced from a viewpoint of contents reliability. On the other hand, the relevance to query keywords and the page types are the ones corresponding to user's domain and task in problem solving. Selection and combination of these factors must be refined for satisfying user's information needs.

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We claim that it is necessary for semantic representations of technical papers to describe a word's meaning from various points of view and emphasize the semantic aspect of words. In this paper, we describe semantic representations of technical papers based on Pustejovsky's GENERATIVE LEXICON(GL). Our focus is on technical papers concerned with metallurgy because this research is carried out in cooperation with an expert in metal engineering. Our purpose for making semantic representations is twofold : (1) to detect differences and inconsistencies among papers by applying appropriate mechanisms; and (2) to integrate the content of a new paper into the content of an existing one. The semantic representations of technical papers based on the generative lexicon are modified so that they match the characteristics ofthe papers. In addition, we propose operations worked effectively on the semantic representation. Modifying some rules included the semantic representation for each paper makes it possible to analyze the semantic differences and similarities among the papers. The semantic representation is implemented using an object-oriented database management system on MATISSE.

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　GUI has been widely used as user interface for computer from about 10 years. Objects or components are arranged in two dimensional plain in lots of GUI software. Some software appears as internet applications which arranges objects in virtual three dimensional space with VRML.
　This paper proposes some kinds of visualizing models for conceptual relations in virtual three dimensional space. Conceptual relations means the states in which many terms(concepts) are complicatedly connected by the semantic relations, such as tool, agent. VRML scripts are experimentally made using the EDR concept dictionary to examine effectiveness and problems.

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[in Japanese]

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