Extending functional databases for use in text-intensive applications

This thesis continues research exploring the benefits of using functional databases based around the functional data model for advanced database applications-particularly those supporting investigative systems. This is a growing generic application domain covering areas such as criminal and military intelligence, which are characterised by significant data complexity, large data sets and the need for high performance, interactive use. An experimental functional database language was developed to provide the requisite semantic richness. However, heavy use in a practical context has shown that language extensions and implementation improvements are required-especially in the crucial areas of string matching and graph traversal. In addition, an implementation on multiprocessor, parallel architectures is essential to meet the performance needs arising from existing and projected database sizes in the chosen application area. [Continues.

A Spatial Grid File For Multimedia Data Representation

In multimedia databases spatial or high-dimensional data manipulation is important for storage and retrieval. In this study, we introduce a new file structure called Spatial Grid File. This file enables us to index data objects by different and independent high-dimensional attributes. And, with it, well-known spatial query types, such as range queries, nearest neighbor queries and spatial join operations can be efficiently performed. Although the performance of the Spatial-- Grid file structure is based on the indexing methods used, it has a unique feature of combining set of spatial data each having different properties. Furthermore, this file structure is very suitable for parallelization