1. Document base architecture

1.1 Elements of terminology

The document access and retrieval functions are based on the representation provided by the storage function. This representation corresponds to a metastructure that is independent of the characteristics of the set of documents to be stored, which themselves have their own structure.

In the context of document databases, the concept of structure is fundamental, given the multiple structures that can be attached to a document: physical, logical, semantic, syntactic, graphic, temporal, hypertextual, linguistic, rhetorical, discourse structures, presentation, etc. Informally, a document is considered to be an assembly of labeled, possibly typed elements (document fragments), referred to as "document units". This assembly respects a certain...