System of information retrieval in XML documents

The Extensible Markup Language (XML) is considered as a new standard for data representation and exchange on the web. XML opens opportunities to develop a new generation of information retrieval system (IRS) to improve the interrogation process of document bases on the Web. We propose an approach to retrieve units (or subdocuments) of relevant information from XML documents. Our work focuses instead on end-users who have not expertise in the domain and of that the structure is them unknown (like a majority of the end-users). This approach supports keywords based searching like classical IRS and integrates structured searching with the search attributes notion. It's based on an indexing method of document tree leafs which authorize so a content-oriented retrieval. The retrieval subdocuments are ranked according to their similarity with user query. We use an similarity measure which is a compromise between two measures exhaustiveness and specificity.