Abstract: Provided is a database management server apparatus that can maintain the consistency of updates and prevent blocking other update requests in an update process. A server apparatus 3 of a database management system 1 has a function of nondestructively updating databases in response to an update request from a client apparatus 2 to manage generation-management databases. A main storage unit 4 stores entities of a plurality of databases for each version of the databases, and a version creating unit 5 creates a new version of the databases in response to an update request from a client apparatus. A request accepting unit 11 accepts an update request for a next version regardless of whether the new version is being created. An acceptance management unit 13 starts a period for accepting the update request for the next version in response to the update request and ends the period for accepting after a predetermined time.

Abstract: A database apparatus has an element appearance information storage portion in which element appearance information is stored using element name IDs as keys, an ancestral path appearance information storage portion in which element appearance information is stored using ancestral path name IDs of the elements as keys, an attribute appearance information storage portion in which attribute appearance information is stored using attribute name IDs as keys, and a text appearance information storage portion in which appearance information about text character strings of element entities and the values of attributes possessed by the elements is stored using the partial character strings as keys.

Abstract: A distributed document retrieval method for performing document retrieval by plural retrieval servers that each perform document retrieval for a database storing plural documents, and an integrating retrieval server that is connected to the plural retrieval servers over communication and issues retrieval orders to the retrieval servers, wherein each retrieval server delivers statistical information created based on intermediate results obtained by retrieval operation to the integrating retrieval server, the integrating retrieval server compiles the statistical information to create global statistical information and delivers it to each retrieval server, and each retrieval server calculates scores based on the global statistical information and sends retrieval results matching retrieval conditions back to the integrating retrieval server. By the above described operation, efficient and correct ranking among retrieval documents is achieved with improved document retrieval quality.

Abstract: A searching apparatus includes an index generation portion for generating an index to provide data of the number of documents including the key word and the number of appearances of the key word. Matching degrees between the key word and documents are calculated from the number of documents including the key word and the number of appearances of the key word. A portion of documents are arranged in order of the matching degree in a buffer which are outputted as the searching result. Lower rank documents regarding the matching degree are searched by comparing the lowest matching degree of the neighbour higher ranked document arranged in the buffer. At first time searching, data of the latest edition of the documents stored in a memory is detected and stored and is used to provide second time searching operation to eliminate inconsistency in the searching result between the editions at first and second time searching operations. The index is generated every field of each document.

Abstract: A system for providing keywords to facilitate a search in a text retrieval system. For each of texts constituting a text base, the system creates a word ID of each of words used in the text and a word occurrence count of a corresponding word. The word occurrence count indicates a number of occurrences of a word in each text. For each of words used in any of the texts constituting the text base, the system creates a total word occurrence count and a containing text count indicative of the number of texts containing the word. For each of words contained in the selected texts, a degree of importance is calculated by using the word occurrence count, the total word occurrence count and the containing text count. The words contained in the selected texts are sorted in order of the degree of importance. At least a part of the sorted words are displayed as related keywords.

Abstract: A document retrieval system for searching a document coinciding with a retrieval request the user inputs and further ranking the document in accordance with the degree of coincidence between the document and the retrieval request. In the document retrieval system, a word frequency calculating section finds out the number of documents where a word appears, a frequency of occurrence of the word in a document and obtains a weighting parameter for the word, and a frequency score calculating section obtains a frequency score on the basis of the output of the word frequency calculating section. In addition, a word cooccurrence relation checking section checks word cooccurrence relations of the retrieval request and the document, and a cooccurrence score calculating section calculates a cooccurrence score from the degree of coincidence therebetween. A document score calculating section calculates a document score on the basis of the frequency score and the cooccurrence score.

Abstract: A rigidity checking method and apparatus is presented. A composite feature vector is first generated by combining three pairs of coordinates obtained for a feature point of a target object from three pictures of the target object. A covariance matrix of the compound feature vector is calculated by finding a product of a variance matrix comprising a variance of each element of the compound feature vector and the transposed matrix of the variance matrix. The rigidity of the target object is calculated by using the element of the covariance matrix and compared with a predetermined threshold to determine whether the target object is a rigid body. Thus, a rigidity checking is directly achieved from the joint distribution of feature points in the three pictures without assuming the coefficients of a set of constraint equations.

Abstract: A new type of text search apparatus, capable of finding all occurrence positions of a search string that is an arbitrary character string, within a text which is written as a continous sequence of characters, utilizes for text position reference purposes in an index file, words which each occur (at least once within the text) as the maximum length word, referred to as an extension word, among a set of arbitrarily predefined dictionary words extending from a specific character position. Each such occurrence of a word as an extension word defines one of a set of text position elements, with that set covering all of the character positions of the text. The index file also includes a table which relates each of the extension words to the respective positions at which each of the partial character strings of the word occur within the word.