Databases Illuminated, 4th Edition

13.2 A Semistructured Data Model

Techniques for searching text documents were originally developed in the field of information retrieval, which was the domain of information scientists rather than database researchers and practitioners. However, with the development of the web, the creation of collections of documents and the searching of those documents became an activity that was done by ordinary computer users rather than just by information specialists. Because of the availability of the rich information resources the web provides, the fields of information science and database management have converged to search and store semistructured data. In the database field, the documents on the web are viewed as data sources similar to other databases, ...