Applying a flexible OODBMS-IRS-coupling to structured document handling

In document management systems, it is desirable to provide content-based access to documents going beyond regular expression search in addition to access based on structural characteristics or associated attributes. We present a new approach for coupling OODBMSs (object-oriented database management systems) and IRSs (information retrieval systems) that provides enhanced flexibility and functionality as compared to coupling approaches reported from the literature. Our approach allows one to decide freely to which document collections, that are used as retrieval context, document objects belong, which text contents they provide for retrieval, and how they derive their associated retrieval values, either directly from the retrieval machine or from the values of related objects. Especially, we show how, in this approach, different strategies can be applied to hierarchically structured documents, possibly avoiding redundancy and IRS or OODBMS peculiarities. Content-based and structural queries can be freely combined within the OODBMS query language.