Re: database or text-retrieval system

nico.jabin@xxxxxxxxx wrote: 
Hi, I'm still trying to get the info together to employ a company to
build an e-library for us. Someone advised me yesterday against
confusing databases with text-retrieval systems, which apparently is
what I want, really. I have never heard of this difference and my
preliminary search on wiki has not produced enlightening thoughts.

The e-library that we hope to develop will have abstracts rather than
full texts, and searches should be performable on all fields including
abstracts.


That is fine.

In what way is a database different from a text-retrieval system?

A text retrieval or better known as information retrieval system or e.g. fulltext search engine or whatever is more a search engine on the data like text or meta data.

When,
if there is a meaningful difference, should I use  the one and not the
other? When looking for companies that implement such systems, can I
still look for database companies, or are there specialised
text-retrieval-system companies out there?

Well most of the recent DBM Systems support full text searching in attributes (e.g. abstract, full, ...) so you could use those feature but I guess a normal fulltext engine would be faster but I'm not sure. Maybe you can combine both systems. I would use a database for all the meta data and a full text search engine for text search purposes.

This would work like this when searching:
- enter search text
- find entries with the full text search engine (entries consists on full and abstract and are identified in the search engine with the PK of the same entry in the database)
- so what you get from the search engine are the PKs of documents containing the searched text
- now look up those entries in your database with all the additional meta data stored in your database

- the advantage is that you're able to store your library entries in a structured way (DB) and be able to do very fast full text search on the same data without losing the structure

Regards
Stefan


Thanks for any thoughts,
Nico

.

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