OOXKSearch: A search engine for answering xml keyword and loosely structured queries using oo techniques

OOXKSearch is a semantic search engine that answers XML keyword-based queries as well as loosely structured queries using Object Oriented techniques. There has been extensive research in XML keyword-based and loosely structured querying. Some frameworks work well for certain types of XML data models while fail in others. The reason is that the proposed techniques are based solely on establishing relationships between individual elements while overlooking the context of these elements. The context of a data element is determined by its parent, because it specifies one of the characteristics of the parent. Since data elements are nothing but characteristics of their parents, we observe that we could treat each parent-children set of elements as one unified entity. We then find semantic relationships between the different unified entities. If two distinct unified entities are semantically related, their data elements are also semantically related. The search performance and quality of OOXKSearch were evaluated experimentally and compared with three recent proposed systems. The results showed marked improvement. [Article copies are available for purchase from InfoSci-on-Demand.com]