A temporal object-oriented model for digital libraries of documents
This paper presents a model for the representation and retrieval of structured documents considering their temporal properties. The purpose of this model is to serve as a platform for the development of digital library applications. Thus, it consists of both a new data model and a query language that are specially adapted to the requirements of these applications. The main elements of the data model are a flexible type system for structured documents, and two temporal dimensions that represent the temporal properties of documents and the evolution of the database schema. As for its query language, it allows the retrieval of documents by specifying conditions on their structure, contents and temporal properties. This query language has been designed for exploiting the temporal information stored into a large digital library, making possible to relate document contents in time, as well as to analyse the evolution of topics. The paper also includes some guidelines for the efficient implementation of databases of structured documents by adopting the proposed data and query models. Copyright (C) 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
digital libraries structured documents complex data models