Design, Performance and Analysis of Innovative Information Retrieval is divided into five sections. This collection of highly technical essays contains a “Compilation of references” as well as a subject index. The chapters in the fifth section contain “Additional reading” recommendations in addition to the references cited. Some of the chapters in this section also contain “Key terms and definitions” sections.
“Foundation of keyword search in XML” of the first section, “Keyword search and XML stream processing techniques,” provides a nice overview of smallest lowest common ancestor (SLCA), exclusive lowest common ancestor (ELCA) and meaningful lowest common ancestor (MLCA). “An efficient and flexible approach of keyword search in XML” presents an “adaptive keyword search” approach. “SKeyword search,” which makes use of OWL, is outlined in “Ontology-driven keyword search for heterogeneous XML data sources.” The remaining three chapters of the first section, which is written by Weidong Yang and Hao Zhu, address issues related to XML streaming.
The second section, “Retrieving information from compressed XML documents according to vague queries,” written by Badya Al-Hamadani and Joan Lu, introduces “XML Compressing and vague querying (XCVQ).” “State of the art technology in compressing and querying XML Documents” contains several useful tables, including “The main differences between XML-conscious and XML-blind compressors,” “The main limitations of some queriable XML compressors,” and “A comparison of difference compression techniques.” The authors found that XCVQ had the best average compression ratio when compared to other XML compressors. This section had several appendices.
In the third section, “Automatic mapping of XML documents into relational database,” Ibrahim Dweib and Joan Lu unveil MAXDOR, a new model for mapping XML which does not use XML schemas. They clearly present their testing strategy, system requirements and program languages used in “Experiments and their assessment.” They found that there was a loss of information with the use of their algorithm which ignores “processing instructions, comments, CDATA sections and external entities. Furthermore, [the model] needs an enhancement to consider multiple occurrences of text in one element”(265). The authors provide a bulleted list of several ways to improve the functionality of MAXDOR.
In the fourth section, “An investigation in multi-feature query language based classification in image retrieval,” Raoul Pascan Pein, Joan Lu, and Wolfgang Renz investigate “how ‘Content-based image retrieval (CBIR)’ queries could be designed in order to achieve extensive language understandable by both humans and machines” (271) and their CBIR design extends the previous work of Raoul Pascan Pein. They conclude by suggesting several avenues of further related research.
The fifth section, “Business process in information retrieval,” contains the chapters “An overview of business process management,” “Business process modeling: analyss and evaluation,” “Advanced branching and synchronization patterns description using Pi-Calculus,” “Modeling process exception handling,” “A rule-based approach to model business process,” and “The description and relations of WS-CDL and BPEL.”). Business process management “can be considered an extension of classical workflow management (WFM) systems and approaches” (393).
This book is recommended for advanced academics and practitioners in computing science and related applications disciplines.
