A loosely-coupled integration of a text retrieval system and an object-oriented database system

ABSTRACT

Document management systems are needed for many business applications. This type of system would combine the functionality of a database system, (for describing, storing and maintaining documents with complex structure and relationships) with a text retrieval system (for effective retrieval based on full text). The retrieval model for a document management system is complicated by the variety and complexity of the objects that are represented. In this paper, we describe an approach to complex object retrieval using a probabilistic inference net model, and an implementation of this approach using a loose coupling of an object-oriented database system (IRIS) and a text retrieval system based on inference nets (INQUERY). The resulting system is used to store long, structured documents and can retrieve document components (sections, figures, etc.) based on their contents or the contents of related components. The lessons learnt from the implementation are discussed.

REFERENCES

• 1: Jurgen Annevelink, Database programming languages: a functional approach, Proceedings of the 1991 ACM SIGMOD international conference on Management of data, p.318-327, May 29-31, 1991, Denver, Colorado, United States
• 2: Jay Banerjee , Hong-Tai Chou , Jorge F. Garza , Won Kim , Darrell Woelk , Nat Ballou , Hyoung-Joo Kim, Data model issues for object-oriented applications, ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS), v.5 n.1, p.3-26, Jan. 1987 [doi>10.1145/22890.22945]
• 3: David C. Blair, An extended relational document retrieval model, Information Processing and Management: an International Journal, v.24 n.3, p.349-371, May 1988 [doi>10.1016/0306-4573(88)90101-X]
• 4: J. P. Callan, W.B. Croft, and S.M. Harding. The INQUEKY retrieval system. Technical report, Department of Computer Science, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA 01003, 1992.
• 5: M. P. Consens , A. O. Mendelzon, Expressing structural hypertext queries in graphlog, Proceedings of the second annual ACM conference on Hypertext, p.269-292, November 1989, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States [doi>10.1145/74224.74247]
• 6: W. Bruce Croft , Howard R. Turtle , David D. Lewis, The use of phrases and structured queries in information retrieval, Proceedings of the 14th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval, p.32-45, October 13-16, 1991, Chicago, Illinois, United States [doi>10.1145/122860.122864]
• 7: W. B. Croft , R. Krovetz , H. Turtle, Interactive retrieval of complex documents, Information Processing and Management: an International Journal, v.26 n.5, p.593-613, 1990 [doi>10.1016/0306-4573(90)90104-A]
• 8: W. Bruce Croft , Howard R. Turtle, Retrieval of Complex Objects, Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Extending Database Technology: Advances in Database Technology, p.217-229, March 23-27, 1992
• 9: D.H. Fishman. Overview of the Iris dbms. Hewlett Packard Technical Report, HPL-SAL-89-15, 1989.
• 10: Norbert Fuhr, A probabilistic framework for vague queries and imprecise information in databases, Proceedings of the sixteenth international conference on Very large databases, p.696-707, September 1990, Brisbane, Australia
• 11: Daniel Barbara , Hector Garcia-Molina , Daryl Porter, A probabilistic relational data model, Proceedings of the international conference on extending database technology on Advances in database technology, p.60-74, March 1990, Venice, Italy
• 12: Clifford A. Lynch , Michael Stonebraker, Extended User-Defined Indexing with Application to Textual Databases, Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Very Large Data Bases, p.306-317, August 29-September 01, 1988
• 13: I.A. Macleod and R.G. Crawford. Document retrieval as a database apphcation. Information Technology: Research and Development, 2:43-60, 1983.
• 14: David Maier , Jacob Stein, Development and implementation of an object-oriented DBMS, Research directions in object-oriented programming, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1987
• 15: Amihai Motro, VAGUE: a user interface to relational databases that permits vague queries, ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS), v.6 n.3, p.187-214, July 1988 [doi>10.1145/45945.48027]
• 16: Gerard Salton and Chris Buckley. Global text matching for information retrieval.Sczen.c~, 253-1012-1015, 1991.
• 17: Gerard Salton , Michael J. McGill, Introduction to Modern Information Retrieval, McGraw-Hill, Inc., New York, NY, 1986
• 18: H.-J. Schek, Methods for the administration of textual data in database systems, Proceedings of the 3rd annual ACM conference on Research and development in information retrieval, p.218-235, June 23-27, 1980, Cambridge, England
• 19: Howard Robert Turtle, Inference networks for document retrieval, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA, 1991
• 20: Howard Turtle , W. Bruce Croft, Evaluation of an inference network-based retrieval model, ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS), v.9 n.3, p.187-222, July 1991 [doi>10.1145/125187.125188]
• 21: K. Wilkinson , P. Lyngbæk , W. Hasan, The Iris Architecture and Implementation, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, v.2 n.1, p.63-75, March 1990 [doi>10.1109/69.50906]
• 22: Stanley B. Zdonik , David Maier, Object-oriented database systems, Readings in object-oriented database systems, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers Inc., San Francisco, CA, 1989

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.2 DATABASE MANAGEMENT

Additional Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.3 INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL
      H.3.1 Content Analysis and Indexing
          Subjects: Indexing methods; Linguistic processing
      H.3.3 Information Search and Retrieval
          Subjects: Retrieval models

General Terms:
Algorithms, Languages