An enhanced Index Structure for a Digital Library Search Engine

The focus of this paper is to design an efficient indexing structure for spatial-temporal-textual data in a digital library environment. Along with traditional document collections, modern digital libraries contain forum discussions, bolg-posts, user provided URLs, and many other digital artifacts. All of these artifacts have time stamps, most of these artifacts have textual description, and some of them might have metadata regarding geographical location. Moreover, the textual descriptions sometimes provide idea regarding time and location. Management and retrieval of information from such multimodal data become very challenging due to the growing nature of digital libraries. Since spatial-temporal queries may not be adequately resolved by conventional text based search engines, we propose an enhanced mechanism to index digital artifacts using a spatialtemporal indexing mechanism called an R*B-tree. We discuss different strategies found in the literature and accept some of them for the proposed search engine.