SP500215 Report of Progress for TREC-II chapter W. Kelleher National Institute of Standards and Technology D. K. Harman Report of Progress for TREC II William Kelleher Systems Environments Corporation November 1,1993 1.0 Introduction Systems Environments is a commercial category B partici- pant in TREC. For the past two years we have been devel- oping a software system starting on a DOS based PC and recently moving to Windows NT on the same 486/25 PC. Much development time has been diverted toward getting around bugs and trying to fit the system on small (200 Mb disks and within the memory constraints of the DOCS sys- tem). At this time the system is still under development. FORMS is designed and implemented using the object ori- ented approach. Object oriented methods were chosen to create a system architecture that can be installed in a vari- ety of different environments using different architectures. In its smallest implementation FORMS can function as a personal information system on a single PC, or it can be installed as a organization wide system using client server approach. The basic objects and their relationships are shown in the following diagram and described in the fol- lowing sections. 2.1 SGML Documents 2.0 System Architecture FORMS (Feedback, Object-oriented Retrieval Methods) is an object oriented, concept based information retrieval system. FORMS is concept based because it creates a profile of the users information need and matches that profile to the doc- ument profiles. Profile can be stored in a library of con- cepts which is retained from one use of the system to another. Relevance feedback is an essential ingredient in the design of FORMS although so far it has not been used inTREC. 275 A document arrives and first must be translated into an SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language) Docu- ment.