The Gold Text Indexing Engine

The proliferation of electronic communication including computer mail, faxes, voice mail, and net news has led to a variety of disjoint applications and usage paradigms that forces users to deal with multiple different user interfaces and access related information arriving over the different communication media separately. To enable users to cope with the overload of information arriving over heterogeneous communication media, we have developed the Gold document handling system that allows users to access all of these forms of communication at once, or to intermix them. The Gold system provides users with an integrated way to send and recieve messages using different media, efficiently store the messages, retrieve the messages based on their contents, and to access a variety of other sources of useful information. At the center of the Gold document handling system is the Gold Text Indexing Engine (GTIE) that provides a full text index over the documents. The paper describes our implementation of GTIE and the concurrency control protocols to ensure consistency of the index in the presence of concurrent operations.