MIRE: a multidimensional information retrieval engine for structured data and text

Abstract

This paper presents an original information-retrieval engine, called MIRE, for integrating structured data and text. Among other things, MIRE is designed to work in a natural and efficient way with the inherent hierarchies of structured data. While multidimensional access methods have originally been developed for spatial applications, they can be successfully used to index hierarchical structured data and add to an existing information retrieval engine the capability of navigating hierarchical dimensions. To support this capability, MIRE enhances the processing algorithms of an existing multidimensional access method to avoid overflow and support for hierarchical dimensions. Compared to a search engine with multiple indexes for a different type of search, the multidimensional approach shows a significant reduction in the number of page accesses over a large document collection.