User's Guide

Table of Contents (TOC)

• Introduction 

   

  Using Your Web Browser 

  • Selecting from Lists 

   

  Query 

  • Composing Queries 
  • How CLARIT Processes Queries 
  • Instructions for Query page 

   

  Search Results 

  • Instructions for Search Results page 

   

  Edit Query 

  • CLARIT Query Terms 
  • CLARIT Query Term Distribution 
  • CLARIT Term Weights 
  • Instructions for Edit Query page. 

   

  Enhance Query 

  • Instructions for Enhance Query page. 

   

  Display 

  • Viewing a Text Document on the Display page 
  • Viewing an Image Document on the Display page 
  • Instructions for a Text Display page. 
  • Instructions for an Image Display page 

   

  NEPIS Command Reference 

Introduction

The National Environmental Publications Information System (NEPIS) uses CLARIT an advanced search system from CLARITECH Corporation. NEPIS provides plain English full-text retrieval over the contents of one or more databases. NEPIS uses plain English queries; you do not need to learn a special query language. 

A CLARIT query is a prose description specifying the information you want to find. CLARIT uses natural language processing to identify the concepts in your query and return a ranked list of documents containing those concepts. 

CLARIT can also use natural language processing to enrich your query with related concepts found in the documents most relevant to your query. 

NEPIS provides concept-based, interactive retrieval for document collections based on their full-text content. Features include the following: 

• Fast, high-precision search and retrieval from multi-gigabyte document collections 
• Support for natural-language queries (words, phrases, document excerpts) and query by example (whole documents) 
• Simultaneous search across multiple databases 
• Results ranked by relevance 
• Query expansion based on automatic discovery of associated concepts 

Clarit Pages

Each Clarit page is organized as follows:  

• Title. At the top of each page is its title. 
• Command Buttons. If the page is long, the command buttons appear both at the top and botton of the page, so you can select a command without scrolling to the botton of the page. (On shorter pages, commands only appear at the bottom.) 
• Help Links. Links to pages about the commands, the NEPIS User's Guide, and directions for the page. If there are additional command buttons at the bottom of the page, More commands below is listed. For example: 

• • ---

  • Enhance Query

    ---

    [Search] [Edit Query] 

    Help for Commands     General Help     Instructions 
    

    ---

• Step-by-step instructions for the page. These numbered instructions lead you through the task for the current page. Links to help pages for each step follow the instruction. For example: 
• • 1. Select additional query terms: (Help for Enhancing Queries) (Help for Selecting) 
• Results, such as the query terms, the list of documents, or the actual document display. 
• The command buttons. Options for any commands are presented here. 

• • ---

  • Choose a command from above or below (Help for Commands): 
    [Search] [Edit Query] 
    Choose how search results are initially displayed: [list of results] 
    

    ---

• At the bottom of each page is the reset button. If you want to erase any changes you made to the page, use Reset. For example: 

• • ---

  • Clear any changes you have made to this form: [Reset Form] 
    

    ---

Clarit Help

Each CLARIT page has a hypertext link to this User's Guide entitled General Help and a link to step-by-step directions for that page entitled Instructions following the command buttons at the top. 

Links to topical help follow each applicable step. For example, click on Help for Results to display the help page for CLARIT search results. Use the Browser's Back command to return to the starting page. 

1. Select one or more documents from the results list: (Help for Results) 

---

[TOC] [Web Browser] [Query] [Results] [Edit] [Enhance] [Display] [Commands]