Annotative Indexing

This paper introduces annotative indexing, a novel framework that unifies and generalizes traditional inverted indexes, column stores, object stores, and graph databases. As a result, annotative indexing can provide the underlying indexing framework for databases that support retrieval augmented generation, knowledge graphs, entity retrieval, semi-structured data, and ranked retrieval. While we primarily focus on human language data in the form of text, annotative indexing is sufficiently general to support a range of other datatypes, and we provide examples of SQL-like queries over a JSON store that includes numbers and dates. Taking advantage of the flexibility of annotative indexing, we also demonstrate a fully dynamic annotative index incorporating support for ACID properties of transactions with hundreds of multiple concurrent readers and writers.

@article{clarke2025_2411.06256,
  title={ Annotative Indexing },
  author={ Charles L. A. Clarke },
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2411.06256},
  year={ 2025 }
}