Querying the World Wide Web
- Univ. of Toronto (Canada)
- Tel Aviv Univ. (Israel)
The World Wide Web is a large, heterogeneous, distributed collection of documents connected by hypertext links. The most common technology currently used for searching the Web depends on sending information retrieval requests to {open_quotes}index servers{close_quotes}. One problem with this is that these queries cannot exploit the structure and topology of the document network. In this paper we propose a query language, WebSQL, that takes advantage of multiple index servers without requiring users to know about them, and that integrates textual retrieval with structure and topology-based queries. We give a formal semantics for WebSQL using a calculus based on a novel {open_quotes}virtual graph{close_quotes} model of a document network. We propose a new theory of query cost based on the idea of {open_quotes}query locality,{close_quotes} that is, how much of the network must be visited to answer a particular query, Finally, we describe a prototype implementation of WebSQL written in Java.
- OSTI ID:
- 535544
- Report Number(s):
- CONF-961209-; TRN: 97:003191-0007
- Resource Relation:
- Conference: 4. international conference on parallel and distributed information systems, Miami Beach, FL (United States), 18-20 Dec 1996; Other Information: PBD: 1996; Related Information: Is Part Of Proceedings of the fourth international conference on parallel and distributed information systems; PB: 307 p.
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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