Flexible Digital Library Search

Abstract

In this chapter the development of a specialised search engine for a digital library is described.  The proposed system architecture consists of three levels: the conceptual, the logical and the physical level.  The conceptual level schema enables by its exposure of a domain specific schema semantically rich conceptual search.  The logical level provides a description language to achieve a high degree of flexibility for multimedia retrieval.  The physical level takes care of scalable and efficient persistent data storage.  The role, played by each level, changes during the various stages of a search engine’s lifecycle: (1) modeling the index, (2) populating and maintaining the index and (3) querying the index.  The integration of all this functionality allows the combination of both conceptual and content-based querying in the query stage.  A search engine for the Australian Open tennis tournament website is used as a running example, which shows the power of the complete architecture and its various components.