Patent ID: 8898555

Claim:
A structured document managing apparatus comprising: an index storing unit that stores, in a page as a fixed-length storage area, a vocabulary index which associates vocabulary identifiers and specific information, the vocabulary identifiers identifying vocabularies included in a structured document having a layered logical structure, the specific information including document identifiers for identifying the structured document where the vocabularies appear and element identifiers for identifying elements where the vocabularies appear, the elements being actual information corresponding to the logical structure in the structured document; a characteristic analyzing unit that analyzes a difference between the document identifiers of a pair of the vocabulary indexes adjacent to each other in the page and a difference between the element identifiers of a pair of the vocabulary indexes adjacent to each other in the page; and a dividing unit that judges whether the difference between the document identifiers exceeds a first threshold value, divides the page into a plurality of blocks between the vocabulary indexes where the difference between the document identifiers exceeds the first threshold value, each of the plurality of blocks including one of a plurality of the vocabulary indexes, judges whether the difference between the element identifiers exceeds a second threshold value decided in advance when the document identifiers coincide with each other, divides the page into the blocks between the vocabulary indexes where the difference between element identifiers exceeds the second threshold value, calculates a first range representing a range of the specific information of the vocabulary indexes included in the blocks, and stores the first range in each of the divided blocks in the index storing unit.