XML Search Engine Evaluation Criteria

• Boolean operators
  • logical (AND, OR, NOT)
    
  • comparison (<, <=, >, >=, ==, != )
    
  • for text
    
  • for numbers
• Proximity
  • Near
    
  • Before
    
  • After
    
  • Within x-bytes or x-characters
• Stop Words
  • Mandatory
    
  • Optional
• Character Sets
  • Unicode support
    
  • Mappings for special characters (e.g. Ko equivalent to Kö in a search )
• Wildcard support
  
• Tag Searching
  
  • Ability to search XML elements and attributes as well as content
• Sorting
  
  • Multi-level
    
  • Ascending
    
  • Descending
• Aggregation
  • Ability to search within a single collection/document
    
  • Ability to search across multiple collections
    
  • Ability to search across multiple databases
• Retrieval
  • Ability to control what is returned when a hit is encountered
    
  • Ability to return hit count with returned
    
  • Ability to transform XML results into other formats(e.g., HTML)

Ingestion Requirements

• Well formed xml
  
• Valid XML w/ DTD
  
• Valid XML w/ XML Schema
  
• Plain text

Indexing

• Support for incremental indexing
  
• Support for multiple indexing
  
• Ability to search across multiple indexes
  
• Size limits on index files
  
• Limits on number of index files

Performance

• Ability to handle large single files (e.g., OED)
  
• Ability to handle many small files (e.g., Repository, metadata )
  
• Ability to load large numbers of documents
  
• Ability to edit documents in a large repository/index
  
• Time required to index new documents

Programmer APIs

• HTTP
  
• Java
  
• C
  
• Perl
  
• C++
  
• Unix command line interface

Available Platforms

• Solaris
  
• AIX
  
• NT/2000

Cost

• Initial cost
  
• Annual maintenance

Company Stability