XML Information Retrieval: Approaches, Relevance and Evaluation

XML is being adopted as a common storage format in scientific data repositories, digital libraries, and on the World Wide Web. As such, there is a need for information retrieval systems that can efficiently and effectively store, search and retrieve information from XML document collections. To evaluate the effectiveness of such systems, test collections are necessary. Such test collections have been built by INEX, the Initiative for the Evaluation of XML retrieval. In this book, we address several fundamental questions surrounding the field of XML information retrieval. In particular, we focus on how information retrieval and database approaches could be combined for effective XML retrieval; how relevance should be defined in XML retrieval; how the effectiveness of XML retrieval systems should be evaluated; and how information retrieval from XML document collections could be used in different application scenarios. The analysis presented in the book should be especially useful to academics and professionals in the Information Retrieval and Native XML Database fields, or anyone else who may be interested in the development of future interactive search systems.