WWW'95: Searching Structured Documents with the Enhanced Retrieval Functionality of freeWAIS-sf and SFgate

Abstract

The original WAIS implementation by Thinking Machines et al. treats documents as uniform bags of erms. Since most documents exhibit some internal structure, it is desirable to provide the user means to exploit this structure in his queries. In this paper, we present extensions to the [freeWAIS][1] indexer and server, which allow access to documents structure using the original WAIS protocol. Major extensions include: arbitrary document formats, search in individual structure elements, stemming and phonetic search, support of 8-bit character sets, numeric concepts and operators, combination of Boolean and linear retrieval. We also present an WWW-WAIS gateway specially tailored for usage with [freeWAIS-sf], which transforms filled out HTML forms to the new query syntax.