Building and experimenting with a heterogeneous collection

Today's integrated retrieval applications retrieve documents from disparate data sources. Therefore, as part of INEX 2004, we ran a heterogeneous track to explore the experimentation with a heterogeneous collection of documents. We built a collection comprising various sub-collections, re-used topics (queries) from the sub-collections and created new topics, and participants submitted the results of retrieval runs. The assessment proved difficult, since pooling the results and browsing the collection posed new challenges and requested more resources than available. This reports summarises the motivation, activities, results and findings of the track.