Formulation of Complex Queries over Web-based Document Collections

摘要

Most search engines use a information retrieval strategy, that requires the user to supply some keywords to find the relevant information. Due to the diversity and unstructuredness of the WWW, those search engines can offer only limited query formulation techniques to find the relevant information. When focusing on smaller domains of the Internet, still large collections of documents have to be dealt with, which are presented on a single web-site or Intranet. There the content is more related and structured, which allows us to apply database techniques to the web. The Webspace Method aims at using database techniques to model and query such document collections. A semantical level of abstraction is obtained, by describing the content of the documents with some high-level concepts, defined in an object-oriented schema. This allows us to bring the power of query formulation as known within a database environment to the web. At the same time, we focus on the integration with information retrieval, which allows us to formulate complex content-based queries over a collection of web-based documents, containing various types of multimedia.