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Semi-Structured Data Model

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Encyclopedia of Database Systems

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Synonyms

Semi-Structured data

Definition

The semi-structured data model is designed as an evolution of the relational data model that allows the representation of data with a flexible structure. Some items may have missing attributes, others may have extra attributes, some items may have two ore more occurrences of the same attribute. The type of an attribute is also flexible: it may be an atomic value, or it may be another record or collection. Moreover, collections may be heterogeneous, i.e., they may contain items with different structures. The semi-structured data model is self-describing data model, in which the data values and the schema components co-exist. Formally:

Definition 0.1

A semi-structured data instance is a rooted, directed graph in which the edges carry labels representing schema components, and leaf nodes (i.e., nodes without any outgoing edges) are labeled with data values (integers, reals, strings, etc.).

There are two variations of semi-structured data, depending...

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Recommended Reading

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  9. Shoens K., Luniewski A., Schwarz P., Stamos J., and Thomas II J. The Rufus system: Information organization for semi-structured data. In Proc. 19th Int. Conf. on Very Large Data Bases, 1993, pp. 97–107.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA

    Dan Suciu

Authors
  1. Dan Suciu
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology, 266 Ferst Drive, 30332-0765, Atlanta, GA, USA

    LING LIU (Professor) (Professor)

  2. Database Research Group David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo, 200 University Avenue West, N2L 3G1, Waterloo, ON, Canada

    M. TAMER ÖZSU (Professor and Director, University Research Chair) (Professor and Director, University Research Chair)

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Suciu, D. (2009). Semi-Structured Data Model. In: LIU, L., ÖZSU, M.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-39940-9_337

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