Structured answers for a large structured document collection

Abstract

There is a simple method for integrating information retrieval and hypertext. This consists of treating nodes as isolated documents and retrieving them in order of similarity. If the nodes are structured, in particular, if sets of nodes collectively constitute documents, we can do better. This paper shows how the formation of the hypertext, the retrieval of nodes in response to content based queries, and the presentation of the nodes can be achieved in a way that exploits the knowledge encoded as the structure of the documents. The ideas are then exemplified in an SGML based hypertext information retrieval system.