Querying a BRICKS digital library

Searching the Web can be frustrating if the sought information is not related to a well defined and popular topic of interest or supplied by renowned Web Sites. One of the main goal of the activities in the area of the Semantic Web is to overcome this problem. The Digital Library (DL) arena is a suitable place to take up the challenge. The growing interest in the Digital Libraries along with the publishing of generalized software that simplifies the building of such systems, has recently improved the standardization of concept and functionalities of DLs, DL Systems and DL Management Systems (DLMS). A significant contribution in this area has been given by EU-funded projects in this area, namely DELOS, BRICKS and DILIGENT. This paper describes the Query Manager of the BRICKS- DLMS, which implements a distributed information retrieval capability, offered in the form of simple search (Google-like) or of advanced search, the latter based on knowledge represented by metadata coming from different schemas. Cross-language discovery, and personalized query and query results, based on user profiles, are other significant characteristics of BRICKS-DLMS Query Manager.