Importance

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Abstract

A method and system are disclosed for searching a set of documents using compact integrated metadata. Each document comprises a set of terms. The metadata comprises a set of topic profiles, each topic profile defining a relationship between a topic and the documents, a set of distinguishing terms for searching the documents by their component terms, and a set of document surrogates for allowing the documents to be searched by topic or by term. The method and system create references from each topic profile to document surrogates relevant to the corresponding topic, and create a set of references from each distinguishing term to document surrogates containing that term. The method and system accept a query and search on the documents using the metadata. The method and system provide the ability to filter the metadata before presentation to the user and to integrate searching on a client processor with searching on a server processor. The method and system provide the ability to maintain a set of search states, each search state describing a subset of the documents to be searched, and a set of filters, which are the queries which resulted in the subset of documents.

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First Claim