Space-Efficient support for temporal text indexing in a document archive context

Abstract

Support for temporal text-containment queries (query for all versions of documents that contained one or more particular words at a particular time t) is of interest in a number of contexts, including web archives, in a smaller scale temporal XML/web warehouses, and temporal document database systems in general. In the V2 temporal document database system we employed a combination of fulltext indexes and variants of time indexes to perform efficient text-containment queries. That approach was optimized for moderately large temporal document databases. However, for "extremely large databases" the index space usage of the approach could be too large. In this paper, we present a more space-efficient solution to the problem: the interval-based temporal text index (ITTX). We also present appropriate algorithms for update and retrieval, and we discuss advantages and disadvantages of the V2 and ITTX approaches. © Springer-Verlag 2003.