As Analytic Information Server (AIS) matures, an increasing number of Lambdas (for instance the Alice chat robot) are reading, indexing, and semantically interpreting XML/HTML documents from the world wide web. As these Lambdas traverse the world wide web, reading XML/HTML documents, and occassionally bringing the important documents home, a mechanism for storing these documents becomes increasingly important. The xmlBase Lambda is designed to service the growing AIS need for storing and retrieving large numbers of XML/HTML documents.
XML databases can be quite large, easily exceeding the storage limits placed on a single AIS repository. Therefore, xmlBase is designed to manage multiple repositories. Each repository is registered to xmlBase either at application launch time or dynamically during the course of running the application. The database is designed such that multiple repositories merge seemlessly together to form a single large XML database
Each XML repository contains two distinct components: the index set; and the record set. The index set is always a collection of word phrases, for example: "PARENTS NAMES", "STATES AND THEIR CAPITALS", OR "THIS IS THE STUFF MARY ASKED ME TO SAVE FOR HER". The record set is always a collection of XML documents which are saved and retrieved using the word phrases found in the index.
When multiple XML repositories are registered to xmlBase, their index sets and record sets are seamlessly merged so that the user perceives just one larger index set and record set. If multiple repositories contain identical index word phrases, then upon retrieval, multiple hierarchically-merged XML documents will be returned.
XML documents are stored in the database using a specific word phrase index. Each XML document can be directly retrieved by using the exact word phrase index with which it was saved. Additionally, XML documents can be retrieved, from the database, using AIS XQuery (a dialect of the XML Query Language currently in design in the World Wide Web Consortium). An excellent overview of the XQuery Language is included in this reference guide.