An Extended Model for Full Text Databases

Query languages of full text retrieval systems are based on several assumptions about the input text. Many systems assume that the input has some basic structure (say, documents and words) which restricts the application domain. Others only allow to retrieve documents and not text positions. We address these problems and we propose an extended model for text, and a query language based on it. The query language is powerful enough to be used as an intermediate language to customized and/or intelligent retrieval applications based on visual interfaces. We also discuss several implementation issues giving preliminary experimental results. Keywords: Text databases, query languages. 1 Introduction Full text retrieval systems are becoming a popular way of providing support for on-line text. Their advantage is that they avoid the complicated and expensive process of semantic indexing. From the end-user point of view, full text searching of on-line documents is appealing because a valid quer..