ELEMENT QUERY METHOD AND SYSTEM

摘要

Methods, systems, and computer-readable media for representing and querying positional information for a hierarchical document (such as an XML document) are disclosed. In one set of embodiments, at least one word in the hierarchical document is associated with one or more word positions, and at least one element in the hierarchical document is associated with one or more word position ranges. The word positions and word position ranges are analyzed to determine whether a particular word or phrase is a direct or indirect descendant of a particular element in the hierarchical document. In various embodiments, the word positions are indexed in a first index and the word position ranges are indexed in a second index. Thus, the analysis may be efficiently performed by intersecting the first and second indexes. In further embodiments, the word position ranges may be encoded in a space efficient format for storage or transmittal.