This paper proposes a semi-structured information retrieval model based on a new method for calculation of similarity. We have developed CASISS (Calculation of Similarity of Semi-Structured documents) method to quantify how two given texts are similar. This new method identifies elements of semi-structured documents using elements descriptors. Each semi-structured document is pre-processed before the extraction of a set of descriptors for each element, which characterize the contents of elements.It can be used to increase the accuracy of the information retrieval process by taking into account not only the presence of query terms in the given document but also the topology (position continuity) of these terms.

Nowadays, the dissemination of information touches the distributed world, where selecting the relevant servers to a user request is an important problem in distributed information retrieval. During the last decade, several research studies on this issue have been launched to find optimal solutions and many approaches of collection selection have been proposed. In this paper, we propose a new collection selection approach that takes into consideration the number of documents in a collection that contains terms of the query and the weights of those terms in these documents. We tested our method and our studies show that this technique can compete with other state-of-the-art algorithms that we choose to test the performance of our approach.

Nowadays, the dissemination of information touches the distributed world, where selecting the relevant servers to a user request is an important problem in distributed information retrieval. During the last decade, several research studies on this issue have been launched to find optimal solutions and many approaches of collection selection have been proposed. In this paper, we propose a new collection selection approach that takes into consideration the number of documents in a collection that contains terms of the query and the weights of those terms in these documents. We tested our method and our studies show that this technique can compete with other state-of-the-art algorithms that we choose to test the performance of our approach.