Abstract: To be applied on one more data processing systems, a collection of documents is ranked by class and attributes. Each document is associated with at least one primary class. Each class contains at least one attribute which extends the meaning of the class. All documents in the data repository are searched for an instance (keyword). The resulting documents are then grouped by the most frequently found class. Each document within each class is then searched and ordered by the most frequently found attributes for that class. Documents are grouped by most frequently found class and then ordered within each class by most frequently found attribute.