SIRIUS: A Lightweight XML Indexing and Approximate Search System at INEX 2005

This paper reports on SIRIUS, a lightweight indexing and search engine [6] for XML documents. The retrieval approach implemented is document oriented. It involves an approximate matching scheme of the structure and textual content. Instead of managing the matching of whole DOM trees, SIRIUS splits the documents object model in a set of paths. This set is indexed using optimized data structures. In this view, the request is a path-like expression with conditions on the attribute values. In this paper, we present the main functionalities and characteristics of this XML IR system and second we relate on our experience on adapting and using it for the INEX 2005 ad-hoc retrieval task. Finally, we present and analyze the SIRIUS retrieval performance obtained during the INEX 2005 evaluation campaign and show that despite the lightweight characteristics of SIRIUS we obtained quite good precision at low recall values.