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Encyclopedia of Database Systems pp 1237–1238Cite as

Document Databases

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Synonyms

Corpora; Document repositories; Text databases

Definition

A document database is a collection of stored texts managed by a system that provides query and update facilities. Usually the database includes many documents related by their subject matter, origin, or applicability to an enterprise. The content of each document may be free text, semi-structured text including a few well-identified fields (e.g., title, author, date), or highly structured tagged text such as might be encoded using XML. Occasionally documents may also contain multimedia components.

In contrast, the term corpus (plural corpora) typically refers to a static collection of texts that have been assembled by experts to study linguistic phenomena (e.g., the Brown Corpus, created in 1964 to study American English, and the Swedish Language Bank) or to provide a rich source of text for lexicographic needs (e.g., the Dictionary of Old English Corpus, including all extant texts written in Old English in the period...

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Recommended Reading

  1. Bertino E, Ooi B, Sacks-Davis R, Tan K-L, Zobel J. Text databases. In: Indexing techniques for advanced database systems. Norwell: Kluwer; 1997. p. 151–84.

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  2. Chin AG, editor. Text databases and document management: theory and practice. Hershey: Idea Group; 2001.

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  3. Christophides V, Abiteboul S, Cluet S, Scholl M. From structured documents to novel query facilities. In: Proceedings of the ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data; 1994. p. 313–24.

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  4. Kilpeläinen P, Lindén G, Mannila H, Nikunen E. A structured text database system. In: Proceedings of the International Conference on Electronic Publishing, Document Manipulation and Typography; 1990. p. 139–51.

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  5. Loeffen A. Text databases: a survey of text models and systems. ACM SIGMOD Rec. 1994;23(1):97–106.

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  6. Lowe B, Zobel J, Sacks-Davis R. A formal model for databases of structured text. In: Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Database Systems for Advanced Applications; 1995. p. 449–56.

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  7. Macleod A. A data base management system for document retrieval applications. Inf Syst. 1981;6(2):131–7.

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  8. Sacks-Davis R, Arnold-Moore T, Zobel J. Database systems for structured documents. In: Proceedings of the International Symposium on Advanced Database Technologies and Their Integration; 1994. p. 272–83.

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  9. Salminen A, Tompa FW. Requirements for XML document database systems. In: Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Document Engineering; 2001. p. 85–94.

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  10. Stonebraker M, Stettner H, Lynn N, Kalash J, Guttman A. Document processing in a relational database system. ACM Trans Inf Syst. 1983;1(2):143–58.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON, Canada

    Frank Tompa

Authors
  1. Frank Tompa
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Frank Tompa .

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. David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON, Canada

    Frank Tompa

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Tompa, F. (2018). Document Databases. 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_807

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