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Encyclopedia of Database Systems pp 3444–3446Cite as

Semi-structured Data

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Synonyms

XML (almost)

Definition

A semi-structured data model is based on an organization of data in labeled trees (possibly graphs) and on query languages for accessing and updating data. The labels capture the structural information. Since these models are considered in the context of data exchange, they typically propose some form of data serialization, i.e., a standard representation of data in files. Indeed, the most successful such model, namely XML (that is promoted by the W3C), is often confused with its serialization syntax. XML equipped with query/update language [10] is a semi-structured data model.

Semi-structured data models are meant to represent from very structured to very unstructured information, and in particular, irregular data. In a structured data model such as the relational model [9], one distinguishes between the type of the data (schema in relational terminology) and the data itself (instance in relational terminology). In semi-structured data models, this...

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Recommended Reading

  1. Abiteboul S, Buneman P, Suciu D. Data on the web: from relations to semistructured data and XML. San Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann; 1999.

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  2. Abiteboul S, Cluet S, Christophides V, Milo T, Moerkotte G, Simeon J. Querying documents in object databases. Int J Digit Libr. 1997;1(1):5–19.

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  3. Abiteboul S, Quass D, McHugh J, Widom J, Wiener J. The Lorel query language for semistructured data. Int J Digit Libr. 1997;1(1):68–88.

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  4. Buneman P, Davidson S, Suciu D. Programming constructs for unstructured data. In: Proceeding of the 5th International Workshop on Database Programming Languages; 1995.

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  5. Cattell RGG. The object database standard: ODMG-93. San Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers; 1994.

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  6. Papakonstantinou Y, Garcia-Molina H, Widom J. Object exchange across heterogeneous information sources. In: Proceeding of the 11th International Conferences on Data Engineering; 1995. p. 251–60.

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  7. Specification of Abstraction Syntax Notation One (ASN.1), ISO Standard 8824, Information Processing System. 1987.

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  8. Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML), ISO 8879. 1986.

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  9. Ullman JD. Principles of database and knowledge-base systems, vol. I: classical database systems. Computer science. 1988.

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  10. XQuery. XQuery 1.0: An XML query language. http://www.w3.org/TR/Xquery.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Inria, Paris, France

    Serge Abiteboul

Authors
  1. Serge Abiteboul
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Serge Abiteboul .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Georgia Institute of Technology College of Computing, Atlanta, GA, USA

    Ling Liu

  2. University of Waterloo School of Computer Science, Waterloo, ON, Canada

    M. Tamer Özsu

Section Editor information

  1. Laboratoire d'Informatique de Grenoble, CNRS and LIG, Grenoble, France

    Sihem Amer-Yahia

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Abiteboul, S. (2018). Semi-structured Data. In: Liu, L., Özsu, M.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-8265-9_799

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