SA_MetaMatch: Document Discovery Through Document Metadata and Indexing

a component of the Standards Advisor (SA), is designed to find relevant documents through matching indices of metadata and document content. The elements in the metadata schema are mainly adopted from the Dublin Core (DC). The implementation of the XML metadata schema and coding follows the DC recommended guidelines. After metadata is generated manually for an unstructured document, or is extracted automatically from documents of well defined layout, they are stored in metadata files or in a repository. The indices of the descriptive metadata elements and that of the document content are generated. They are searched and compared to find related documents, based on our observation that if the metadata and high frequency index words of document content are related, then the corresponding documents are likely to be related as well. A ranked list of possible relevant documents is returned as the result. Several matching algorithms have been explored. We selected a sum of word-scored approach which not only gives relevant scores for the matched documents, but also gives an individual score for each of the matching words which provide hints for domain experts to grasp the concepts in the documents.