An application-oriented approach for hytime structured document management

Abstract

In this article, we point out the important functionality needed by emerging multimedia applications such hypermedia presentations or digital library retrieval systems to prepare the next generation database systems. Uniform management of hypermedia data is required to be suitable to various kinds of applications: different data types, different data model, varied data format or i/o devices. DBMSs provide efficient data storage facilities but still lack of customizability according to the target applications. Moreover, content-based and structure-based retrieval management are required by modern information retrieval systems. In order to combine the requirements of information retrieval systems and opened DBMS, we have implemented information retrieval functions inside the Application-Oriented DBMS Phasme. The document representation is either SGML or HyTime. SGML or HyTime documents are stored inside Phasme and are accessed using full text retrieval functionality. Such functionality are implemented as Phasme plug-ins and are stored inside Phasme. The storage management of the documents is independent from the way the user application will retrieve them. The developments achieved so far inside the AHYDS project (Active HYpermedia Delivery System) currently under process at NACSIS illustrate the chosen architecture design of the retrieval system. The performance of the current prototype is evaluated against a 40 GB document Benchmark showing that our approach yields excellent results.