Administering structured documents in Digital Libraries

Abstract

In this chapter we argue that hyperdocuments administered by d i g ital libraries have to be structured according to standardized storage and exchange formats in order to allow for the manipulation functionality required in digital library construction, maintenance and use. We demonstrate how SGML and its extension, HyTime, can play this structuring role, and how m ultimedia documents structured accordingly can be stored, changed and maintained in the object-oriented database system VODAK. Using the dynamic semantic extension facilities of VODAK it is illustrated how the document structuring dynamics o ered by SGML and HyTime can be accommodated in the database. In addition we discuss how t h i s facility can be combined with other system components to provide a relevant portion of the functionality required for digital libraries.

Building a Hybrid Database Application for Structured Documents

“…For example,`ET INSTTYPE' in the box corresponding to instances of ElementType indicates that these instances have properties and methods that are defined by class ElementType.`CS INSTINSTTYPE' reflects that they have properties and methods provided by the modeling primitive CS. In [4] it has been described that element types also take part in another specialization relationship that is modeled using CATSPEC. Hence, NONTERMINAL and its instances have properties and methods provided by two modeling primitives.…”

“…With regard to the databaseinternal representation of documents, we see two alternatives. The first approach is to have a completely structured database-internal representation, i.e., each logical document component corresponds to a database object [1,4,13,8]. The advantage is that document modifications with arbitrary granularity are facilitated, and that the HyTime-semantics can be exploited to refine the modeling in order to support efficient implementation of certain HyTime-specific operations.…”

Metadata for multimedia documents

“…the number of documents written by a certain author in a collection of documents is based on the corresponding piece of metainformation for individual multimedia documents. 3 Organizing Metadata for Multimedia Documents Due to space limitations, with our reflections about the organization of metadata in this section we limit ourselves to the possibilities according to two international standards for document handling.…”

Applying a flexible OODBMS-IRS-coupling to structured document handling

“…With regard to (2), the concepts of DBMSs have been developed for managing structured data in multi-user environments. With advanced DBMS systems like object-oriented ones, it also becomes feasible to successfully manage complex document structures within DBMSs [BAN94], such that the aspects (1) and (2) can be covered simultaneously.…”

“…At our institute a database application framework to administer structured documents has been realized based on the OODBMS VODAK [ABH94,BAN94]. In the database, documents are fragmented in accordance with their logical structure, i.e., for each element (e.g.…”