Durable top-k search in document archives

We propose and study a new ranking problem in versioned databases. Consider a database of versioned objects which have different valid instances along a history (e.g., documents in a web archive). Durable top-k search finds the set of objects that are consistently in the top-k results of a query (e.g., a keyword query) throughout a given time interval (e.g., from June 2008 to May 2009). Existing work on temporal top-k queries mainly focuses on finding the most representative top-k elements within a time interval. Such methods are not readily applicable to durable top-k queries. To address this need, we propose two techniques that compute the durable top-k result. The first is adapted from the classic top-k rank aggregation algorithm NRA. The second technique is based on a shared execution paradigm and is more efficient than the first approach. In addition, we propose a special indexing technique for archived data. The index, coupled with a space partitioning technique, improves perfor...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: SIGMOD
• Authors: Leong Hou U, Nikos Mamoulis, Klaus Berberich, Srikanta J. Bedathur
• Keywords: Database, Durable Top-k Queries, SIGMOD 2010, Top-k Queries, Top-k Search