Indexing structured documents

• US 20030226108A1
• Filed: 05/31/2002
• Published: 12/04/2003
• Est. Priority Date: 05/27/2002
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: SAP SE
• Original Assignee: SAP AG (SAP SE)
• Inventors: Oezgen, Markus
• Granted Patent: US 7,305,613 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 715/513
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/951 Indexing; Web crawling techniques

Abstract

Methods and apparatus, including computer program products, for indexing structured documents. A method includes identifying a structured document in a file system for indexing, the structured document having an identifier and at least one indexing-property, extracting at least one index-value from the structured document in accordance with a pre-defined extraction rule-set and storing the at least one index-value with the identifier in an index-value data structure.

Claims

1. A method for indexing structured documents comprising:

identifying a structured document in a file system for indexing, the structured document having an identifier and at least one indexing-property;

extracting at least one index-value from the structured document in accordance with a pre-defined extraction rule-set; and

storing the at least one index-value with the identifier in an index-value data structure.

2. The method of claim 1 in which the file system for indexing is a Web based Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV) file system.

3. The method of claim 1 in which the at least one indexing-property is selected from the group of document-type, URL and document-version.

4. The method of claim 1 in which the structured document is a markup language document with a markup-language selected from the group of XML, XHTML and WML.

5. The method of claim 1 in which the index-value data structure is stored as a relational database table.

6. The method of claims 2 in which the WebDAV file system is stored in a relational database management system (RDMS).

7. The method of claim 1 in which the pre-defined extraction rule set comprises a plurality of XPath-expressions.

8. The method of claim 1 in which the file system is processed by a first processor and the identifying, extracting and storing are executed by a second processor.

9. he method of claim 2 in which identifying, extracting and storing are executed synchronously when generating the structured document in the WebDAV file system.

10. The method of claim 2 in which identifying, extracting and storing are executed asynchronously when generating the structured document in the WebDAV file system.

11. The method of claim 1 further comprising repeating identifying, extracting and storing for a plurality of structured documents in the file system.

12. A method comprising:

identifying a plurality of structured documents in a file system for indexing, each of the structured documents having an identifier and at least one indexing-property;

extracting at least one index-value from each of the structured documents in accordance with a pre-defined extraction rule-set; and

storing the at least one index-value with the identifier in an index-value data structure for each of the plurality of structured documents.

13. The method of claim 12 in which identifying comprises determining whether the structured document is locked.

14. The method of claim 12 in which the file system is a WebDAV file system.

15. The method of claim 12 in which each of the structured documents is a markup language document.

16. An article comprising:

a storage medium having stored thereon instructions that when executed by a machine result in the following;

identify a structured document in a file system for indexing, the structured document having an identifier and at least one indexing-property;

extract at least one index-value from the structured document in accordance with a pre-defined extraction rule-set; and

store the at least one index-value with the identifier in an index-value data structure.

17. A computer program product, tangibly stored on a machine readable medium, for indexing structured documents, comprising instructions operable to cause a programmable processor to:

identify a structured document in a file system for indexing, the structured document having an identifier and at least one indexing-property;

extract at least one index-value from the structured document in accordance with a pre-defined extraction rule-set; and

store the at least one index-value with the identifier in an index-value data structure.