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The use of information retrieval systems in networked environments raises a new set of issues that have received little attention. These issues include ranking document collections for relevance to a query, selecting the best set of collections from a ranked list, and merging the document rankings that are returned from a set of collections. This paper describes methods of addressing each issue in the inference network model, dkcusses their implementation in the INQUERY system, and presents experimental results demonstrating their effectiveness. 1
Callan et al. (Sun,) studied this question.