Browsing in a loosely structured database
Amihai Motro · 1984
Current database architectures emphasize structure and are inappropriate for applications which model environments that are subject to constant evolution, or environments which do not lend themselves to massive classifications In this paper we describe an architecture which promotes databases that are only loosely structured heaps of facts instead of highly structured data This architecture avoids the traditional dichotomy between "schema" and "data", and it incorporates a single mechanism for defining both inference rules and integrity constraints As lack of organization will usually have adverse effect on retrieval, the principal retrieval method for loosely structured databases is browsing exploratory searching which does not assume any knowledge of the organization (or even the very existence of organization) Two styles of browsing, called navigation and probing, are defined Both are derived from a standard query language based on predicate logic