A STRUCTURED TEXT ADT FOR OBJECT-RELATIONAL DATABASES

There is a growing need to develop tools that are able to retrieve rel evant textual information rapidly, to present it in a meaningful way, and to integrate it with related data retrieved from other sources. Th ese tools are critical to support applications within corporate intran ets and across the rapidly evolving World Wide Web. This paper introdu ces a framework for modelling structured text and presents a small set of operations that may be applied against such models. Using these op erations structured text may be selected, marked, fragmented, and tran sformed into relations for use in relational and object-oriented datab ase systems. The extended functionality has been accepted for inclusio n within the SQL/MM standard, and a prototype database engine has been implemented to support SQL with the proposed extensions. This prototy pe serves as a proof of concept intended to address industrial concern s, and it demonstrates the power of the proposed abstract data type fo r structured text. (C) 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.