WebSSQL - a query language for multimedia Web documents

Abstract

In this paper, we describe an SQL-like query language - WebSSQL - for retrieving desired web pages. Web-SSQL has several unique features. First, WebSSQL assumes that each web page is a multimedia document consisting of structured data, text data and possibly image data. Second, WebSSQL treats each page as a node in a directed graph composed of many web pages and links among them. Third, WebSSQL is similarity-based meaning that the retrieved web pages will be ranked based on their closeness to a given query. The traditional SQL does not support similarity-based retrieval and ranking. With WebSSQL, users can specify their search needs more precisely, leading to more accurate retrieval of useful information.