xml-dev - Re: xml search engine?

[Holger Flörke <hf@daisybytes.com>]

>There is a problem I see for xml search engines. How are they going to
>cope with all the various DTD's? They ARE going to cope, but what will
>be the result? Will we have lots of small search engines searching for
>information in all reinforced_concrete_supplier.dtd xml files it can
>find and another for all medicine.dtd info? Will there be a few
>standard elements in most DTD's to comply to some emerging behaviour
>of all search engines? There are so many ways this could work out. Any
>opinions? 

To cope with this problem I developed the concept of "structural roles".
Each role refers to a set of elements that have common semantics. A role
can be named for end-user simplicity (eg. "Author" is the name of the role
referring to all authors in a collection). The roles and their semantics are
defined by the provider of a collection.

Everyone who would like to insert a document in the collection has to
create a mapping from the role to the concrete structure of his document.
This mapping can be done by assigning eg. simple/general path expressions,
or a XQL expression to each role stored in an additional RDF description.
The information provider is able to index the document in the terms of roles.

Roles does not have any internal hierarchy dependencies. They provide a
necessary level of abstraction for indexing collections of XML documents.
The end-user can query the collection using the roles.

Based on this concept I have defined a query language and a retrieval
function. You may try the query engine with (meanwhile outdated, we will
update this as soon as possible) sample data from the 'SGML/XML
Bibliography' provided by Robin Cover and OASIS (thanks a lot)

  http://www-xpres.cs.bonn.edu

Greetings

HolgeR

---------------------------------------------- daisy bytes! ---------
 Holger Floerke                                
 hf@daisybytes.com                       digital document processing
 http://www.daisybytes.com                  electronic publishing

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