The Design of Combinatorial Information Retrieval Systems for Files with Multiple-Valued Attributes

The recent advent of large scale, high-speed computers has produced an “information revolution.” One of the consequences of this has been the need for the development of filing systems which are capable of handling large volumes of data and permitting efficient information retrieval. This research is concerned with a file structure in which parameters like number of attributes, number of levels of each attribute, and types of queries are known and fixed. For this type of situation, first a review is given for a number of different types of filing schemes which have been recently discussed in the literature. Then attention is turned to a general model and filing systems based on certain types of combinatorial configurations. The construction of one type of configuration is achieved through the development of suitable methods of extending some of the properties of certain small orthogonal arrays to larger schemes. This type of construction may be combined with certain other schemes to yield multistage filing systems which permit efficient retrieval for an appropriate set of queries.