A data-driven, hierarchical information search and navigation system and
method enable search and navigation of sets of documents or other
materials by certain common attributes that characterize the materials.
The invention includes several aspects of a data-driven, hierarchical
search and navigation system that employs this search and navigation
mode. The search and navigation system of the present invention includes
features of an navigation interface, a search interface, a knowledge base
and a taxonomy definition process and a classification process for
generating the knowledge base, a graph-based navigable data structure and
method for generating the data structure, World Wide Web-based
applications of the system, and methods of implementing the system. Users
are able to search or browse a particular collection of documents by
selecting desired values for the attributes or by searching the
attribute-value pairs. A data-driven, hierarchical information search and
navigation system and method enable this navigation mode by associating
terms with the materials, defining a set of hierarchical relationships
among the terms, providing a guided navigation mechanism based on the
relationship between the terms, and providing a search mechanism that can
respond to free-text queries with single-term or multi-term
interpretations. In another aspect of the invention, implementations of
the invention may be scalable through parallel or distributed
computation.