Temporal JSON Keyword Search

Abstract

JSON keyword search searches the current versions of documents in a collection. However, JSON documents change over time due to edits. Some applications, such as data forensics and auditing, need to search past versions of documents and for changes to documents. This paper introduces a system called Temporal JSON Keyword Search (TJKS) for search in a collection of JSON documents that vary over time. TJKS lets users control which temporal slice, or part of the history, can be searched using a temporal search semantics; we support both of the major temporal semantics: sequenced and nonsequenced search. This paper presents the semantics of temporal JSON keyword search, discusses an efficient implementation, and evaluates the implementation. Our extensions are largely orthogonal to specific keyword search techniques, so this research provides a blueprint for extending keyword search to include time and potentially other kinds of metadata.