Digital library organisation, text classification, library classification schemes, Document Preparation and Text Processing, Information Systems Applications , Multimedia Information Systems,
With the significant growth in electronic education materials such as syllabus documents and lecture notes available on the Internet and intranets, there is a need for developing structured central repositories of such materials to allow both educators and learners to easily share, search and access them. This paper reports on our on-going work to develop a national repository for course syllabi in Ireland. In specific, it describes a prototype syllabus repository system for higher education in Ireland that has been developed by utilising a number of information extraction and document classification techniques, including a new fully unsupervised document classification method that uses a web search engine for automatic collection of training set for the classification algorithm. Preliminary experimental results for evaluating the system’s performance are presented and discussed.