Modeling, encoding and querying multi-structured documents

• Published in: Information processing & management Vol. 48; no. 5; pp. 931 - 955
• Main Authors: Portier, Pierre-Édouard, Chatti, Noureddine, Calabretto, Sylvie, Egyed-Zsigmond, Elöd, Pinon, Jean-Marie
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Kidlington Elsevier Ltd 01.09.2012; Elsevier; Elsevier Science Ltd
• Subjects: Computer Science; Data processing; Digital; Document and Text Processing; Document management; Documents; Electronic documents; Encoding; Exact sciences and technology; Extensible Markup Language; Formalism; Information and communication sciences; Information processing and retrieval; Information retrieval; Information retrieval. Man machine relationship; Information science. Documentation; Management; Multi-structured document; Multi-structured document querying; MultiX; Research process. Evaluation; Sciences and techniques of general use; Structures; Studies; Tasks; XML; XQuery; Multi-structured document; XML; XQuery; MultiX; Multi-structured document querying; Multix
• ISSN: 0306-4573; 1873-5371
• DOI: 10.1016/j.ipm.2011.11.004

The issue of multi-structured documents became prominent with the emergence of the digital Humanities field of practices. Many distinct structures may be defined simultaneously on the same original content for matching different documentary tasks. For example, a document may have both a structure for the logical organization of content (logical structure), and a structure expressing a set of content formatting rules (physical structure). In this paper, we present MSDM, a generic model for multi-structured documents, in which several important features are established. We also address the problem of efficiently encoding multi-structured documents by introducing MultiX, a new XML formalism based on the MSDM model. Finally, we propose a library of Xquery functions for querying MultiX documents. We will illustrate all the contributions with a use case based on a fragment of an old manuscript.