A structured documents retrieval method supporting attribute-based structure information

There are many studies on retrieval methods for structured documents but most of the studies are for those whose structure information is expressed by elements. But when elements are used to describe a document structure, the structure becomes static and difficult to expand. So describing a document structure using attributes is used in many standards. But most of the existing systems support mainly element-based structured documents and do not consider attribute-based ones. Hence they do not support attribute-based structured documents well. So, we propose a new indexing method that supports attribute-based structured documents. In our index scheme, element-based structure information and attribute-based structure information are seamlessly integrated to describe a general document structure. Also, we consider possible searching methods under the proposed index, and implement each method. And then, we experiment each method using the document actually being used in business, then analyze the results.