Semantic cache mechanism for heterogeneous Web querying

In Web-based searching systems that access distributed information providers, efficient query processing requires an advanced caching mechanism to reduce the query response time. The keyword-based querying is often the only way to retrieve data from Web providers, and therefore standard page-based and tuple-based caching mechanisms turn out to be improper for such a task. In this work, we develop a mechanism for efficient caching of Web queries and the answers received from heterogeneous Web providers. We also report results of experiments and show how the caching mechanism is implemented in the Knowledge Broker system. (C) 1999 Published by Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.