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Document Databases

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Encyclopedia of Database Systems

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Synonyms

Document repositories; Text databases; Corpora

Definition

A document database is a collection of stored texts managed by a system that provides query and update facilities. Usually the database includes many documents related by their subject matter, origin, or applicability to an enterprise. The content of each document may be free text, semi-structured text including a few well-identified fields (e.g., title, author, date), or highly structured tagged text such as might be encoded using XML. Occasionally documents may also contain multimedia components.

In contrast, the term corpus (plural corpora) typically refers to a static collection of texts that have been assembled by experts to study linguistic phenomena (e.g., the Brown Corpus, created in 1964 to study American English, and the Swedish Language Bank) or to provide a rich source of text for lexicographic needs (e.g., the Dictionary of Old English Corpus, including all extant texts written in Old English in the period...

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Recommended Reading

  1. Bertino E., Ooi B., Sacks-Davis R., Tan K.-L., and Zobel J. Text databases. In Indexing Techniques for Advanced Database Systems. Kluwer Academic, Norwell, MA, 1997, pp. 151–184.

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  7. Macleod A. A data base management system for document retrieval applications. Inf. Syst., 6(2):131–137, 1981.

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  8. Sacks-Davis R., Arnold-Moore T., and Zobel J. Database systems for structured documents. In Proc. Int. Symp. on Advanced Database Technologies and Their Integration, 1994, pp. 272–283.

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  9. Salminen A. and Tompa F.W. Requirements for XML document database systems. In Proc. ACM Symp. on Document Engineering, 2001, pp. 85–94.

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  10. Stonebraker M., Stettner H., Lynn N., Kalash J., and Guttman A. Document processing in a relational database system. ACM Trans. Inf. Syst., 1(2):143–158, 1983.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON, Canada

    Frank Wm. Tompa

Authors
  1. Frank Wm. Tompa
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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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© 2009 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC

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Tompa, F.W. (2009). Document Databases. In: LIU, L., ÖZSU, M.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-39940-9_807

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