Scalable hybrid search on distributed databases

Abstract

We have previously described a hybrid keyword search that combines metadata search with a traditional keyword search over unstructured context data. This hybrid search paradigm provides the inquirer additional options to narrow the search with some semantic aspect from the XML metadata query. But in earlier work, we experienced the scalability limitations of a single-machine implementation. In this paper, we describe a scalable hybrid search on distributed databases. This scalable hybrid search provides a total query result from the collection of individual inquiries against independent data fragments distributed in a computer cluster. We demonstrate our architecture extends the scalability of a native XML query limited in a single machine and improves the performance for some queries. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.