Document ranking apparatus, method and computer program

An enterprise file system including document storage and a document ranking apparatus for ranking electronic documents on a file path of a file system taking into account relevance of the documents to a search term, the apparatus comprising:

• a semantic description generating module configured to generate a semantic description of a document using document contents and to store the semantic description in a semantic description repository;
• a similarity-based scoring module configured to compute a similarity score based on a similarity between the semantic description of the document and the search term;
• a quality indicator-based scoring module configured to compute a quality score of the document based on completeness, correctness and freshness of the document;
• a combining module configured to accept user input for relative weighting of the similarity score and the quality score and to combine a resultant relatively-weighted similarity score and quality score to provide a final score for a document;
• and
• a ranking module configured to rank the documents on the file path based on the final score.

A document ranking method for ranking electronic documents on a file path of a file system based on a relevance of the documents to a search term, the method comprising, for each document:

• one of generating a new semantic description of a document, and accessing a semantic description of the document in a semantic description repository;
• storing any new semantic description of the document in the semantic description repository;
• computing a similarity score based on a similarity between the semantic description of the document and the search term;
• computing a quality score of the document based on completeness, correctness and freshness of document contents;
• accepting user input for relative weighting of the similarity score and the quality score;
• combining a resultant relatively-weighted similarity score and quality score to provide a final score for the document;
• and
• for all the documents for the file path, ranking the documents based on the final score.

A non-transitory computer-readable storage medium storing a computer program which when executed on a computing system carries out a document ranking method for ranking electronic documents on a file path of a file system based on a relevance of the documents to a search term, the method comprising, for each document:

• one of generating a new semantic description of a document, and accessing a semantic description of the document in a semantic description repository;
• storing any new semantic description of the document in the semantic description repository;
• computing a similarity score based on a similarity between the semantic description of the document and the search term;
• computing a quality score of the document based on completeness, correctness and freshness of document contents;
• accepting user input for relative weighting of the similarity score and the quality score;
• combining a resultant relatively-weighted similarity score and the quality score to provide a final score for the document;
• and
• for all the documents for the file path, ranking the documents based on the final score.