SYSTEM AND METHOD OF RANKING AND RETRIEVING DOCUMENTS BASED ON AUTHORITY SCORES OF SCHEMAS AND DOCUMENTS

The ranking manager and associated method of the present invention rank the authority of XML documents and their corresponding schemas using an iterative process over a set of hyperlinked XML documents and their schemas. The ranking manager introduces the notion of authoritative schemas and document structure, and maintains an authority score for each document in the set, a hub score for each document in the set, and an authority score for each schema that is used by one or more documents in the set. The ranking manager initializes these scores according to predefined criteria, and then recomputes in successive iterations: (1) the authority scores for each schema based on the hub scores of the documents that use the schema and the authority scores of the documents that use the schema, (2) the authority scores for each document based on the authority score for the schema that it uses and the hub scores of the documents that point to it, and/or (3) the hub scores for each document in the set based on the authority score for the schema that it uses and the authority scores of the documents that it points to. The ranking manager performs these computations until convergence or a threshold value of difference is reached.