Adapting a data organization to the structure of stored information

Abstract

A data organization for information retrieval (IR) systems is described which uses the structures imposed on the stored information. Trees are used as the main structure of data as information contents are often hierarchically structured (e.g. classifications, thesauri). However, these trees have been expanded to pseudo networks by so-called cross connecting paths. So-called data connecting paths link the information structures and the main data file. Terms occurring in the query formulation may be weighted. These weights are interpreted and then used by both the retrieval and ranking algorithm. One of the paramount problems is how to combine weighted query terms. Since the well-known IR schemes (Boolean retrieval, fuzzy retrieval etc.) do not work in our environment, a specific IR model was developed which allows to deduct suitable query and ranking evaluation algorithms.