XLibris

Abstract

While recent work has focused on providing tools and infrastructure for users to access electronic information over the Internet, the relationship between the physical world and information available online has been relatively unexplored. Information about a user's location, and the objects she interacts with, can be sufficient to recognize enough of the user's task to drive retrieval of online information relevant to the task at hand. The XLibris system automatically retrieves, aggregates, and delivers information about books to users as they are checked out of the library, using information about the books themselves and the user's task. XLibris locates books in the Dewey Decimal subject hierarchy to automatically search for the most relevant information about the book for the user, tailoring both the sources queried and the information returned based on the book's position in the hierarchy.