RESULTS

Thus far in our real life example, 24 documents have been indexed using the system. The indexing resulted in the augmentation of 648 sections with metadata. Our testing of the system has revealed that, for any given query, none of the returned results were irrelevant.

Deploying this system into the real world, the search front end for this system was made available as one of the subsystems of a large information system devised to aid farmers in their farming activities. The system as a whole has six more subsystems, including two expert systems, a forum, a problem reporting facility, and a search front end for economic data, all of which are accessible from a web interface. Analyzing web log data for the first four months of the year 2003 has revealed that the page from which the search front end was made available was the second most-visited page (after the site's main web page). We believe that the reason for this page's popularity is the ease with which it allows users to locate specific items of interest, a task that would have otherwise been tedious even if a keyword search model was made available for these documents.

This system can also be a powerful research tool as researchers can, for example, easily study the manifestations of a single disease on different crops by specifying that disease and omitting any specific crop in the query, thus, loosening it.