System of Information Retrieval in XML Documents

Abstract

This chapter introduces the process to retrieve units (or subdocuments) of relevant information from XML documents. For this, we use the Extensible Markup Language (XML) which is considered as a new standard for data representation and exchange on the Web. XML opens opportunities to develop a new generation of Information Retrieval System (IRS) to improve the interrogation process of document bases on the Web. Our work focuses instead on end-users who do not have expertise in the domain (like a majority of the end-users). This approach supports keyword-based searching like classical IRS and integrates structured searching with the search attributes notion. It is based on an indexing method of document tree leafs which authorize a content-oriented retrieval. The retrieval subdocuments are ranked according to their similarity with the user’s query. We use a similarity measure which is a compromise between two measures: exhaustiveness and specificity.