Searching Documents on the Intranet
Roelof van Zwol, Peter M. G. Apers · University of Twente Research Information · 1999
Searching for documents on the internet with today’s search engines, which are mainly based on words in a document, is not satisfactory. Results can be improved by also taking the content of a document into account. The Extensible Markup Language (XML) enables us to do semantic tagging and to make the structure of a document explicit. But this describes a document only at the syntactical level. A more ideal situation would be when the XML tagging is also used to define the document at the semantical level. To realize this we allow an author of a document to describe the relevant concepts by means of tags like he would design an object-oriented database schema. In our approach a user searching for a particular document is presented a graphical description of such a schema, that describes the concepts defined for the webspace of an intranet. Via this interface the user can formulate OO-like queries or navigate to relevant web pages. To realize our ideas we are building an architecture based on the concept of an index-database. A prototype is up and running.