Potential Cases, Database Types, and Selection Methodologies for Searching Distributed Text Databases

Abstract

The rapid proliferation of online textual databases on the Internet has made it difficult to effectively and efficiently search desired information for the users. Often, the task of locating the most relevant databases with respect to a given user query is hindered by the heterogeneities among the underlying local textual databases. In this chapter, we first identify various potential selection cases in distributed textual databases (DTDs) and classify the types of DTDs. Based on these results, the relationships between selection cases and types of DTDs are recognized and necessary constraints of database selection methods in different cases are given which can be used to develop a more effective and suitable selection algorithm.