A parameterised search system

textabstractThis paper introduces the concept of a Parameterised Search System (PSS), which allows flexibility in user queries, and, more importantly, allows system engineers to easily define customised search strategies. Putting this idea into practise requires a carefully designed system architecture that supports a declarative abstraction language for the specification of search strategies. These specifications should stay as close as possible to the problem definition (i.e., the retrieval model to be used in the search application), abstracting away the details of the physical organisation of data and content. We show how extending an existing retrieval system with an abstraction mechanism based on array databases meets this requirement