User Interface in Digital Libraries

Project acronym: QUESTION-HOW
Project Full Title:Quality Engineering Solutions via Tools, Information and Outreach for the New Highly-enriched Offerings from W3C: Evolving the Web in Europe
Project/Contract No. IST-2000-28767
Workpackage 2, Deliverable D3-XML/RDF Digital Libraries

Project Manager: Daniel Dardailler <danield@w3.org>
Author of this document: Oreste Signore <oreste.signore@isti.cnr.it>

Created: 28 August 2003. Last updated: 04/09/2003 13.32


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General description

The main task has been to develop a user interface to query complex and specialized XML documents corpora (like juridical documents, cultural heritage cataloguing cards, user manuals, etc.).
At the lower level, we make use of the XCDE library developed at the Department of Computer Science, University of Pisa. The core of the library (indexing and compressing algorithms) remain property of their authors. The library is written in C and provides a set of efficient algorithms and data structures for indexing and searching an XML document collection.
The documents must be well-formed and may be heterogeneous in that they may reflect different DTDs. The library supports the storage and management of these XML files in native form, operating directly at the File System level. The main features of the library are: state-of-the-art algorithms and data structures for text indexing, compressed space occupancy, and novel succinct data structures for the management of the hierarchical structure of the XML document.
The library provides an API with a rich set of functions to operate on its whole collection of data structures and algorithms. It may implement most of the basic functionalities of XQuery at the higher level, and it may support more complex IR-like searches.
The user interface gets the document structure from the XMLSchema, and makes use of some RDF facilities to broadening or narrowing query terms, implementing a graphical browsing of thesauri, in order to support semantic equivalences for more effective searches.


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