A structured text ADT for object-relational databases

There is a growing need to develop tools that are able to retrieve relevant textual information rapidly, to present textual information in a meaningful way, and to integrate textual information with related data retrieved from other sources. These tools are critical to support applications within corporate intranets and across the rapidly evolving World Wide Web. This paper introduces a framework for modelling structured text and presents a small set of operations that may be applied against such models. Using these operations structured text may be selected, marked, fragmented, and transformed into relations for use in relational and object-oriented database systems. The extended functionality has been accepted for inclusion within the SQL/MM standard, and a prototype database engine has been implemented to support SQL with the proposed extensions. This prototype serves as a proof of concept intended to data type for structured text