Distributed Search for Structured Documents

Nikita Schmidt, Researcher, Department of Computer Science, University College Dublin, Ireland. Email: cetus@cnds.ucd.ie

Ahmed Patel, Senior Lecturer, Department of Computer Science, University College Dublin, Ireland. Email: apatel@cnds.ucd.ie

Keywords

Information structure, Hierarchy, Distributed search, Attribute set

Abstract

The quality of search performed by a search engine can be improved by letting the user specify conditions on the information structure associated with document content. Some centralised search engines have implemented structure-aware search. However, in a distributed heterogeneous search system, structured search is more difficult. The difficulties are associated with the different structural organisation of documents in different databases. This complicates presentation of query forms to the user and the adaptation of queries for propagation to different target systems. Selection of targets for query propagation also needs to be structure-aware. This paper presents an approach taken in the distributed search system being developed by the authors.