Generating an XML-Based Search Index for an Effective Search of Office Documents

Office applications are becoming a major pillar of today‟s organizations since they are used to edit a vast amount of digital documents. Finding these office documents in large databases that fit users‟ needs is becoming increasingly important. Broad one- or two-word searches in conventional search engines are often plagued by low precision, returning many irrelevant documents as their output. In order to solve this problem, we propose a technique that allows users to define search terms inside office documents and term descriptions presenting semantic relationships between the office documents and their search terms. This technique provides a means that generates an XML-based search index allowing users to effectively find out target office documents by search conditions, whose definitions are based on document types, search terms, and term descriptions. We also present the schema of the proposed search index that allows users to effectively search office documents of various types, and also present a search framework that uses the proposed technique.