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As the number of documents available to access, review, and analyze explodes, analysts combing through huge document libraries for specific information need more powerful search capabilities. This paper explores the idea of providing relatively a simple search programming functions to research analysts. Such a language would provide tools that go far beyond the typical boolean queries currently available to document searchers. The proposed search programming language provides analysts with fundamental programming functions such as code re-use, storing query strings and intermediate results as variables, incorporating queries as callable functions, providing decision controls (such as if..else decision points), supplying looping control (such as do...while loops), and simple debugging tools. Of course, organizations providing searchers with such powerful tools will need to protect their data stores against search programs that might impose undue processing overhead on their systems (for example, infinite looping) or accesses too many data store documents. This paper examines how such a system might be designed and issues related to its implementation.

Document Search Programming, Search Functions, Information Systems