INTERROGATION DEVICE FOR ELECTRONIC ARCHIVE SYSTEMS AND ELECTRONIC ARCHIVE SYSTEMS

摘要

The invention relates to an interrogation device and to an electronic archive system comprising an input/output unit (1, 2), and a calculation device (3) which co-operates with an accumulator (4) for documents containing (user) data and metadata. The calculation unit comprises a search module (31) which generates, by using search values, hit lists with projections of search values. According to the invention, the calculation unit (3) comprises, in addition to the search module, a specification module (32) and a recursion module (33). The specification module (32) comprises an observation unit which is embodied in such a manner that it can determine, by means of examination criteria, whether metadata is ontology based, in order to indicate associated ontologies for selection and in relation to selected ontologies, to extract ontology specific metadata, in addition to an evaluation unit which is embodied in such a manner that it analyses the extracted metadata, by means of a statistical method, and distributes an expression list of the metadata. The recursion module (33) is embodied in such a manner that it can indicate the metadata of the expression list as hypotheses for the solution of the respective search problems and can carry out significance tests, can select significant hypotheses and can transfer search values, on the search module (31), in order to repeat the transfer until a stop signal is reached. Due to the recursive inclusion of ontology specific metadata, the significance thereof to each cycle is evaluated and the efficiency of the interrogation is significantly increased. The inventive archive system also relates to incoming documents which are to be developed, that is, to be selected and to be classified in relation to predetermined ontologies, whereby the resulting storage organisation ensures efficient, ontology specific interrogation.