A Retrieval Model for Common Textual Database Management Systems

Abstract

From the 1994 CAIS Conference:
The Information Industry in Transition
McGill University, Montreal, Quebec. May 25 - 27, 1994.

The social mission of information professionals is to provide society with high quality information storage and retrieval services. In order to fulfill this mission, the professionals need to have an understanding of the tools they use that is sufficiently thorough for predicting the behavior of these tools in all normal circumstances. One important class of tools used by information professionals are the textual database management systems (TDBMS's). At present, the retrieval capabilities of these systems are almost without excep- tion incompletely described, a situation which sometimes renders the accurate prediction of their behavior dicult. Thus, the quality of in- formation storage and retrieval services that the body of information professionals can provide society is not as high as it could be. To cor- rect this situation, the retrieval behavior of the TDBMS's available to information professionals must be precisely and exhaustively described. In other words, an abstract retrieval model has to be elaborated for them.

In this paper, we present what we believe to be the ?rst formally de?ned abstract retrieval model especially designed for describing the retrieval behavior of common, everyday TDBMS’s. The model is rigorously de?ned and can be used as a basis for describing the retrieval behavior of most of the existing TDBMS’s that use boolean logic and so-called “repeating”values. . The process of modeling the retrieval behavior of TDBMS’s shows that the form of query expressions accepted by existing systems is fairly restricted, and suggests a possible (and easily implementable) generalization. We show that this generalization would not only allow the formulation of interesting and meaningful requests that are impossible (or very dif?cult) to formulate in the present systems, but would in fact grant logical completeness to retrieval languages, a form of completeness analogous to relational completeness in the relational model.