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Encyclopedia of Database Systems pp 2857–2862Cite as

Structure Indexing

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Synonyms

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

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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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology, 266 Ferst Drive, 30332-0765, Atlanta, GA, USA

    LING LIU (Professor) (Professor)

  2. Database Research Group David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo, 200 University Avenue West, N2L 3G1, Waterloo, ON, Canada

    M. TAMER ÖZSU (Professor and Director, University Research Chair) (Professor and Director, University Research Chair)

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© 2009 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC

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Consens, M.P. (2009). Structure Indexing. In: LIU, L., ÖZSU, M.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-39940-9_376

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