An Investigation of Index Formats for the Search of MathML Objects

Users cannot search information by mathematical formulas as queries in existing search engines. This is because mathematical formulas are not expressed as a sequence of characters. Some formulas are expressed in a complex structure like fractional numbers and index numbers. We present a search engine for MathML objects using the structure of mathematical formulas. The system makes the inverted indices by using the DOM structure of the MathML object. The indices are constructed from some paths of the DOM structure and are expressed in XPath. This paper describes the experiment conducted to study the effectiveness of those indices by using the mathematical contents which are open to the public on the Internet.