Magnet: Supporting Navigation in Semistructured Data Environments

With the growing importance of systems containing arbitrary semistructured relationships, the need for supporting users searching in such repositories has grown. Currently support for users’ search needs either has required domain-specific user interfaces or has required users to be schema experts. We have developed a generalpurpose tool that offers users helpful navigation and refinement options for seeking information in these semistructured repositories. We show how a tool can be built without requiring domain-specific assumptions about the information being explored. In addition to describing a general approach to the problem, we provide a set of natural, general-purpose refinement tactics, many generalized from past work on textual information retrieval. Keywords Navigation, searching/browsing, information retrieval, semistructured data, metadata Categories and Subject Descriptors H.3 [Information Search]: Information Search and Retrieval; H.3.3 [Information Search and Retr...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: SIGMOD
• Authors: Vineet Sinha, David R. Karger
• Keywords: Arbitrary Semistructured Relationships, Database, Information Retrieval, Information Search, SIGMOD 2005