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Structural Indexing

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  • First Online:
Encyclopedia of Database Systems

  • 16 Accesses

Synonyms

Dataguide; Path index; Sketch; Structural index; Structural summary; Synopsis

Definition

Structure indexing creates summaries of the structure present in semi-structured data collections by grouping data items with similar structure, providing a mechanism to index such items. Since semi-structured data models are commonly represented by labeled graphs or trees (the XML data model being a prime example), structural indexes or summaries are naturally described as graphs where nodes represent sets of data items (called extents), and where edges represent structural relationships between the corresponding extents derived from the instance data. A concrete physical index can be created by selecting appropriate data structures to store the graph and the extents.

Structure indexing helps to find data items that satisfy structural constraints in queries by locating nodes in the structural summary graph that satisfy the query conditions (expecting far less summary nodes than data...

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Recommended Reading

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada

    Mariano P. Consens

Authors
  1. Mariano P. Consens
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Mariano P. Consens .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Georgia Institute of Technology College of Computing, Atlanta, GA, USA

    Ling Liu

  2. University of Waterloo School of Computer Science, Waterloo, ON, Canada

    M. Tamer Özsu

Section Editor information

  1. David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science, Univ. of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

    Frank Tompa

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Consens, M.P. (2018). Structural Indexing. In: Liu, L., Özsu, M.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-8265-9_376

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