On the Web and Document Databases

This paper describes the functional requirement and architecture of a software system called Web and Document Databases (WDDBs). A WDDB is a system to manage efficiently local documents and their semantic connection to remote ones. The general objective of a WDDB is to facilitate web search and internet navigation. Abstractly, a WDDB can be defined as a triple <D.U.W>, where D stands for a local document database to store XML documents structurally, U for a set of URLs with each pointing to a remote database which shares common data with the local one, and W for a Web recognizer that identifies information sources related to data items in the local database. Then in the case that a local document database fails to answer part of a query, it is able to connect to other databases using the stored URLs to obtain data for answering the query completely. In this way, surfing of the Internet can be performed more efficiently.