Concept integration of document databases using different indexing languages

An integrated information retrieval system generally contains multiple databases that are inconsistent in terms of their content and indexing. This paper proposes a rough set-based transfer (RST) model for integration of the concepts of document databases using various indexing languages, so that users can search through the multiple databases using any of the current indexing languages. The RST model aims to effectively create meaningful transfer relations between the terms of two indexing languages, provided a number of documents are indexed with them in parallel. In our experiment, the indexing concepts of two databases respectively using the Thesaurus of Social Science (IZ) and the Schlagwortnormdatei (SWD) are integrated by means of the RST model. Finally, this paper compares the results achieved with a cross-concordance method, a conditional probability based method and the RST model.