Incremental Data Organization for Ancient Document Databases

In this paper, we introduce a mechanism for incremental data organization of semi-structured data in handling ancient Chinese document data. The objective of the mechanism is to support scientists’ incremental and hypothetical work processes (object/type identification, classification and verification/abstraction from users’ multiple viewpoints). We have developed a prototype incremental database system based on an Object-Oriented DBMS, Gemstone. The mechanisms realized by our system are (1) an instance-based data model which allows class extensions of heterogeneous objects, multiple class memberships and multiple roles of instances, and incremental object/schema evolution, (2) anchor object definition and manipulation, which enables users to define any fragments of text data as independent objects at run-time, (3) an active rule mechanism for enforcing the integrity constraints of the class membership of heterogeneous objects, and incremental schema/object generation, and (4) data set analyzing tool for data sets, which generates an intensional representation for a given data set to verify the validity of classification works and/or to discover concepts.