Patent ID: 7111000

Claim:
A method, comprising: processing a query for a search term of a database containing a plurality of structured documents; ferreting out those structured documents that do not include the search term; evaluating elements of matched structured documents which are those structured documents that do contain the search term by: ranking the individual elements based on how well each individual element matches the search term, wherein the ranking the individual elements includes ranking those paths, in which ln ⁢ N n i is the inverse document frequency (IDF) value is of query term t i , which represents the query term's weight, and Q is the number of query terms in a query, using the calculation: Rank ( Path p ) = ∑ i = 1 Q ⁢ ⁢ Weight ⁡ ( t i , E j ) × ln ⁢ N n i ; and indicating to the user the ranking of the individual elements wherein the individual elements can be accessed by the user.