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Encyclopedia of Database Systems pp 2882–2887Cite as

Processing Structural Constraints

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Definition

When searching unstructured plain text, the user is limited in the expressive power of their query – they can only ask for documents that are about something. When structure is present in the document, and with a query language that supports its use, the user is able to write far more precise queries. For example, searching for “smith” in a document is not necessarily equivalent to searching for “smith” as an author of a document. This increase in expressive power should lead to an increase in precision with no loss in recall. By specifying that “smith” should be the author, all those instances where “smith” was the profession will be dropped (increasing precision), while all those in which “smith” is the author will still be found (maintaining recall).

Historical Background

With the proliferation of structured and semi-structured markup languages such as SGML and XML came the possibility of unifying database and information retrieval technologies. The Evaluation of XML...

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Recommended Reading

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand

    Andrew Trotman

Authors
  1. Andrew Trotman
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Andrew Trotman .

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. University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Jaap Kamps

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Trotman, A. (2018). Processing Structural Constraints. 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_280

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