A Graphic User Interface for Content and Structure Queries in XML Retrieval

Structured Information Retrieval works with documents internally organised around a well defined structure, typically XML documents. In this research field, documents are not retrieved as a whole, but only those most specific relevant parts of the documents are delivered to the users. Lots of models have been developed to deal with the new dimension of the internal organization. From the point of view of the users, the document structure should be an added value in order to retrieve relevant material, because they are able to specify structural hints, in the form of the types of elements to be retrieved and as restrictions over some elements. There are several ways to query a system specifying content and structure queries (natural and artificial languages), but few of them rely on graphic user interfaces, supporting the users to create queries that fulfil more accurately their information needs. In this paper, we present a graphic user interface with the aim of formulating these types of queries, where the users only have to state what they wish to retrieve and structural restrictions about it.