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3. Accessing and transforming the data base

One of the main purposes of digital data collections is to flexibly access, select, combine, sort, manipulate, etc. data from the underlying data base by varying principles, and to present the output in various formats.

Since standard data base programs allow much more flexible navigations through the underlying data pool, SYMBOLICDATA provides an interface to SQL which allows to define, create, and generate different SQL tables derived from tables of the primary data base. In particular, all interrelation information contained in the primary data base may be extracted to SQL relation tables and stored in your favorite (SQL compliant) data base. This interface, solely ASCII based at the moment, is defined via attributes in meta sd-files.

For presentation of data we use HTML and standard browser techniques. An HTML interface is best suited to present and browse data, to create different views, and trigger search. Interrelations can conveniently be realized by HTML links. As for today, we offer a scratch implementation (see www.SymbolicData.org/Data). A more elaborated interface is under development.


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Next: 4. Two Examples Up: 3. Realizing the Goals Previous: 2. Running benchmark computations
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