Organization of records with unequal multiple-valued attributes and combinatorial queries of order 2

This paper develops theories for constructing filing schemes for formatted files with unequal-valued attributes when the query set contains all queries which specify two values from two attributes. These filing schemes provide a set of buckets for storing accession numbers of records. The retrieval rule is based on identifying a bucket from a query by solving algebraic equations over finite fields. The theories underlying these filing schemes are based on properties of deleted finite geometries. Expressions for retrieval time and storage redundancy are also given. © 1969.