Adding string processing capabilities to data management systems

Abstract

Current data management and information retrieval systems lack advanced string processing capabilities needed in string-oriented application areas like computational molecular biology. Several theoretical models for string processing and querying have been proposed but they either have not been implemented in practice or the implementations are too restricted or platform-dependent to be generally useful. We propose a design for a string processing method that could be used to extend different kinds of data management systems by trying to minimise the interconnections between the database management system and the string handling part. The work continues the development of the Alignment Declaration language, our proposal for specifying string relations, by presenting a new and improved method for evaluating the queries and analysing their finiteness.