An Approach to XML Information Retrieval in Distributed Systems

摘要

Modern search engines are quite successful in finding relevant documents by using Information Retrieval techniques. However, the centralized architecture of systems such as Google raises concerns in regard of the possibility to censure and to manipulate information. Promising alternatives are peer-to-peer search engines that organize themselves without any central index. We propose a distributed search engine that exploits XML structure of documents in order to improve effectiveness (search quality) and efficiency (resources) of the search. The developed system is based on a set of equal and autonomous peers. It is the first solution of its kind worldwide for distributed XML-Retrieval.