Linguistic based search facilities in snowflake-like database schemes

Development of generic and general search is one of the most difficult tasks in website development. In practical day life search is not as difficult. The simplification is based on association and context facilities provided by the language and the application area. We aim in developing a simple and powerful approach to search based on a generalization of the theory of word fields to concept fields and providing an appropriate meta-structuring within database schemata that reflects context- or application-based search in a more appropriate way. The internal meta-structuring is based on star and snowflake meta-structures within the schema. (C) 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.