SGML standardized in ISO 8879 [International Organization for Standardization (1986)] has been proliferated because it can provide various styles and transform documents on different platforms. The SGML document has logical structure information in addition to the contents. As SGML documents are widely used, there is an increasing demand for a storage and retrieval system to use the logical structure of documents efficiently. However, traditional retrieval systems based on document indexes cannot exploit the logical structure appropriately. In this paper, we have developed a document storage and retrieval system based on structure information, where the SGML document is transformed into Grove, which is the document model for DSSSL and HyTime, and stored at an element level by an object-oriented DBMS, Object Store. It supports structured documents and provides a query interface to retrieve information contained in the structures. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.