Patent ID: 7386554

Claim:
A method for performing similarity searching by remote scoring and aggregating, comprising the steps of: persisting user defined functions and configuration files for a similarity search server in one or more remote database management systems; receiving a request by the similarity search server from one or more clients for initiating a similarity search, the request designating an anchor document and at least one search document; generating one or more commands by the similarity search server from the client request; sending the one or more commands from the similarity search server to the one or more remote database management systems; executing the one or more commands in the one or more remote database management systems to determine normalized document similarity scores using the persisted user defined functions and configuration files in the remote database management systems; determining normalized document similarity scores in the remote database management systems using choice algorithms, the choice algorithms using weighting functions applied to results of measure algorithms that determine document leaf node attribute similarity scores; generating a search result by aggregating the similarity scores from the one or more remote database management systems; and sending the search result to the search server for transmittal to the one or more clients.