originally: http://www.oclc.org/research/projects/centroids/default.htm
This project will investigate the creation of centroids from digital collections and evaluate their usefulness in creating automatic descriptions of the collections.
Centroids provide an abstract characterization of the database in a standard format [1] and have been used as a referral mechanism in distributed searching environments.
A centroid can be thought of as a simple inverted index mechanism that can be shared amongst servers in a network environment in order to provide hints as to the location of data in a large, loosely coupled distributed database. A centroid is used by a server or user client to provide it with hints as to which other servers might contain information that is relevant to a user's search. These hints are known as "forward knowledge". [2]
[1] "WHOIS++ & centroids (... plus some other stuff)". Martin Hamilton, Loughborough University. Available at <http://www.roads.lut.ac.uk/anrday/anrday.txt>; downloaded 25 November 2002.
[2] Jon P. Knight and Martin Hamilton, "The Use of Centroids in the ROADS Project." Originally available at <http://hill.lut.ac.uk/Reports/Centroid-use-in-ROADS/node2.html>; downloaded 11.25.2002 from the Internet Archive: <http://web.archive.org/web/19991111113305/hill.lut.ac.uk/Reports/Centroid-use-in-ROADS/node2.html>.