The first area of
exploration was using a text-based indexing and query system, rather than the
standard relational database approach.We chose to use a system based on Lucene, which is an open-source text
search engine.Essentially, each
bibliographic records is treated as a very small document, rather than a
collection of fields in a database.One very significant advantage is that this allowed us to apply
ranking methods that are typically used in text retrieval systems.This capability is built into Lucene.