System for processing at least partially structured data

A system for processing at least partially structured data comprising:

• a topic repository;
• a topic repository populator operative at least partially automatically to employ structure in at least partially structured data to organize said data in association with said topic repository to facilitate access to said data by topic;
• and
• a topic oriented user interface employed by a user to access said data in association with said topic repository by topic.

Topic server apparatus comprising:

• a topic extractor operative to automatically prepare at least one data source, the data source including a multiplicity of data entries, for topic-based retrieval, by automatically extracting a multiplicity of topics from the data entries such that each data entry is assigned to at least one topic;
• a disambiguator operative to automatically rank the relevancy of each of the multiplicity of topics to a given query including defining at least one most relevant topics;
• and
• a data accessor operative to automatically access at least some of the data entries assigned to at least one of the most relevant topics.

An assembly of intercommunicating topic servers, each topic server comprising:

• a topic extractor operative to prepare at least one data source, the data source including a multiplicity of data entries, for topic-based retrieval, by extracting a multiplicity of topics from the data entries such that each data entry is assigned to at least one topic;
• a disambiguator operative to rank the relevancy of each of the multiplicity of topics to a given query including defining at least one most relevant topics;
• and
• a data accessor operative to access at least some of the data entries assigned to at least one of the most relevant topics,
• wherein each topic server includes a topic server intercommunicator operative:
• to receive a user's query,
• to present the user's query to at least one additional topic server, and
• to receive at least one data entries assigned to at least one topic extracted by said at least one additional topic server and ranked by said at least one additional topic server as relevant to the user's query, from at least one data source associated with the additional topic server.

A data retrieval system comprising:

• a first plurality of data sources storing a multiplicity of data entries;
• a second plurality of topic repositories storing topic information characterizing the multiplicity of data entries;
• and
• a third plurality of topic servers associated with the second plurality of topic repositories and performing, responsive to a topic-defining query, topic-based retrieval of selected data entries from among said multiplicity of data entries based on said topic information.