Arbeitspapiere Der Gmd Gmd Technical Report Amplifying the Scope of Document Handling: an Object-oriented Database Application Framework for Structured Document Storage German National Research Center for Information Technology

2 The " Arbeitspapiere der GMD – GMD Technical Reports " primarily comprise preliminary publications, specific partial results and complementary material. In the interest of a subsequent final publication the " Arbeitspapiere/Technical Reports " should not be copied. Critical comments would be appreciated by the authors. No part of this publication may be reproduced or further processed in any form or by any means without the prior permission of GMD. All rights reserved. Abstract With standard database approaches to document storage the document-file objects either are left intact , or one general document structure is assumed. In the first case, full database functionality is not achieved. With regard to the second case we claim that different document types are to be treated differently. – The Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) is a means to identify logical document components. The generic document structure is defined by a set of production rules, a so-called document-type definition (DTD). Using the object-oriented database management system VODAK the design of the meta layer of an application framework to store SGML documents in accordance with their structure is described. Multiuser mode, versioning and sharing of document components are considerably facilitated by appropriate fragmentation of the documents in the database. Using an OODBMS has the advantage that SGML semantics can be factored out from applications and can be integrated into the underlying system. With our approach arbitrary SGML DTDs can be communicated to the system at runtime without system shutdown. In this article we put some emphasis on describing the impact of the data model on the database application's structure.