Mind Your Grammar: a New Approach to Modelling Text.

@inproceedings{DBLP:conf/vldb/GonnetT87,
  author    = {Gaston H. Gonnet and
               Frank Wm. Tompa},
  editor    = {Peter M. Stocker and
               William Kent and
               Peter Hammersley},
  title     = {Mind Your Grammar: a New Approach to Modelling Text},
  booktitle = {VLDB'87, Proceedings of 13th International Conference on Very
               Large Data Bases, September 1-4, 1987, Brighton, England},
  publisher = {Morgan Kaufmann},
  year      = {1987},
  isbn      = {0-934613-46-X},
  pages     = {339-346},
  ee        = {db/conf/vldb/GonnetT87.html},
  crossref  = {DBLP:conf/vldb/87},
  bibsource = {DBLP, http://dblp.uni-trier.de}
}

Abstract

Beginning to create the New Oxford English Dictionary database has resulted in the realization that databases for reference texts are unlike those for conventional enterprises. While the traditional approaches to database design and development are sound, the particular techniques used for commercial databases have been repeatedly found to be inappropriate for text-dominated databases, such as the New OED.

In the same way that the relational model was developed based on experiences gained from earlier database approaches, the grammar-based model presented here builds on the traditional foundations of computer science, and particularly database theory and practice. This new model uses grammars as schemas and "parsed strings" as instances. Operators on the parsed strings are defined, resulting in a "p-string algebra" that can be used for data manipulation and view definition.

The model is representation-independent and the operators are non-navigational, so that efficient implementations may be developed for unknown future hardware and operating systems. Several approaches to storage structures and efficient processing algorithms for representative hardware configurations have been investigated.

Copyright © 1987 by the VLDB Endowment. Permission to copy without fee all or part of this material is granted provided that the copies are not made or distributed for direct commercial advantage, the VLDB copyright notice and the title of the publication and its date appear, and notice is given that copying is by the permission of the Very Large Data Base Endowment. To copy otherwise, or to republish, requires a fee and/or special permission from the Endowment.

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Referenced by

1. Frank Neven, Thomas Schwentick: Query Automata. PODS 1999: 205-214
2. Frank Neven, Jan Van den Bussche: Expressiveness of Structured Document Query Languages Based on Attribute Grammars. PODS 1998: 11-17
3. Hiroyuki Kato, Masatoshi Yoshikawa: Constructing Structured Document Views. ER Workshops 1998: 446-453
4. Paolo Atzeni, Giansalvatore Mecca: Cut & Paste. PODS 1997: 144-153
5. Tuong Dao, Ron Sacks-Davis, James A. Thom: An Indexing Scheme for Structured Documents and its Implementation. DASFAA 1997: 125-134
6. Mariano P. Consens, Tova Milo: Algebras for Querying Text Regions. PODS 1995: 11-22
7. Bharathi Subramanian, Theodore W. Leung, Scott L. Vandenberg, Stanley B. Zdonik: The AQUA Approach to Querying Lists and Trees in Object-Oriented Databases. ICDE 1995: 80-89
8. Mariano P. Consens, Tova Milo: Optimizing Queries on Files. SIGMOD Conference 1994: 301-312
9. Vassilis Christophides, Serge Abiteboul, Sophie Cluet, Michel Scholl: From Structured Documents to Novel Query Facilities. SIGMOD Conference 1994: 313-324
10. Karl J. Lieberherr, Cun Xiao: Formal Foundations for Object-Oriented Data Modeling. IEEE Trans. Knowl. Data Eng. 5(3): 462-478(1993)
11. Roger King, Ali Morfeq: Bayan: An Arabic Text Database Management System. SIGMOD Conference 1990: 12-23
12. Marc Gyssens, Jan Paredaens, Dirk Van Gucht: A Grammar-Based Approach Towards Unifying Hierarchical Data Models (Extended Abstract). SIGMOD Conference 1989: 263-272
13. Christos Faloutsos, Raphael Chan: Fast Text Access Methods for Optical and Large Magnetic Disks: Designs and Performance Comparison. VLDB 1988: 280-293