Flexible, efficient text databases

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Applications relying on text must be built upon principles of data organization similar to those that are fundamental to conventional database systems. For document repositories and other collections of structured text to be managed as databases, we must advance the theory and practice of text data structuring (including representation, language, and implementation strategies). Thus one long-term objective is to support document storage and management by adapting and applying relational database experience to this domain of information. This objective includes designing and prototyping suitable document database systems. The challenge is to discover how the complexity of text, with its intricate structure and diversity of expression, can be efficiently managed. The second, complementary objective is to create systems that provide information fragments as virtual texts ("text views"). These text views can be assembled dynamically to meet various applications' needs, and they can be used as update portals into the database. In the short term, aspects of these objectives will continue to be addressed through three themes: (1) design and implementation of improved algorithms for protecting text from unauthorized access and modification; (2) design and implementation of improved systems for information retrieval, applying practices used in database systems; and (3) design and implementation of text transformation systems for loading structured text databases, for integrating text databases, and for supporting materialized and unmaterialized views. The continued worldwide interest in diverse applications of XML suggests that this research remains timely and crucial to an important economic growth area in Canada. Publishers, data providers (e.g., via the World Wide Web), organizations that rely on any form of text-dominated knowledge base for conducting their internal and external business, and software system providers will benefit from specific tools that arise from this research as well as from the theory, which will provide a framework for designing their databases.