Documents usually have a content and a structure. The content refers to the text of the document, whereas the structure refers to how a document is logically organized. An increasingly common way to encode the structure is through the use of a mark-up language. Nowadays, the most widely used mark-up language for representing structure is the eXtensible Mark-up Language (XML). XML can be used to provide a focused access to documents, i.e. returning XML elements, such as sections and paragraphs, instead of whole documents in response to a query. Such focused strategies are of particular benefit for information repositories containing long documents, or documents covering a wide variety of topics, where users are directed to the most relevant content within a document. The increased adoption of XML to represent a document structure requires the development of tools to effectively access documents marked-up in XML. This book provides a detailed description of query languages, indexing strategies, ranking algorithms, presentation scenarios developed to access XML documents. Major advances in XML retrieval were seen from 2002 as a result of INEX, the Initiative for Evaluation of XML Retrieval. INEX, also described in this book, provided test sets for evaluating XML retrieval effectiveness. Many of the developments and results described in this book were investigated within INEX. Table of Contents: Introduction / Basic XML Concepts / Historical Perspectives / Query Languages / Indexing Strategies / Ranking Strategies / Presentation Strategies / Evaluating XML Retrieval Effectiveness / Conclusions
About the Author: Professor Mounia Lalmas has taken up in September 2008 the position of Research Chair in Information Retrieval at the University of Glasgow funded by Microsoft Research/Royal Academy of Engineering. She was previously a Professor of Information Retrieval at Queen Mary, University of London, which she joined in 1999 as a lecturer. Prior to this, she was a Research Scientist at the University of Dortmund in 1998, a Lecturer from 1995 to 1997 and a Research Fellow from 1997 to 1998 at the University of Glasgow, where she received her PhD in 1996. Her research focuses on the development and evaluation of intelligent access to interactive heterogeneous and complex information repositories, and covering a wide range of domains such as Web, XML, and MPEG-7. From 2002 until 2007, she co-led with Norbert Fuhr the Evaluation Initiative for XML Retrieval (INEX), a large-scale project with over 80 participating organizations worldwide, which was responsible for defining the nature of XML retrieval, and how it should be evaluated. She has given numerous presentations and lectures on XML retrieval and evaluation, for instance at CIKM, SIGIR and ESSIR. She is now working on technologies for aggregated search and bridging the digital divide. She is also currently getting back into theoretical information retrieval where she is looking at the use of quantum theory to model interactive information retrieval. She is currently the ACM SIGIR Vice-Chair. She was the workshop co-chair at SIGIR 2004 and 2006, mentoring chair at SIGIR 2009, PR (co-) chair at CIKM 2008 and WI/IAT 2009, PC chair at ECIR 2006, vice co-chair for the XML and Web Data track at WWW 2009, and general co-chair of IIiX 2008. She serves on the TOIS, IP&M and IR journal editorial boards.