CASE-BASED ORGANIZING AND QUERYING OF A DATABASE

摘要

A system for case-based organizing and querying of a database (102). The database (102) may comprise a set of objects (106), such as text documents. The database (102) may be organized by examining each object (106) and associating that object (106) with a set of property values, such as keywords. A document may be associated with those words which appear more frequently in the document than in the database (102) at large, or which appear in the early text of the document, or which appear in the title. The system may be responsive to a query (104) by associating the query with a similar set of property values and performing case-based matching on the objects (106) of the database (102) for similar objects (106). The query (104) may be natural-language text and may be associated with keywords. The system may present matched objects in response to the query (104), may respond to iterative refinement of the query and may order matched objects by quality of match. The system may also respond to the result of organizing matched objects for presentation with suggestions for iterative refinement of the query (104).