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Schema-free Data Models

Many new DBMSs provide (key,value) stores
  • key is a unique identifier (cf. URI)
  • value is an arbitrarily complex "object"
    • e.g. a text document  (often structured, e.g. Wiki, XML)
    • e.g. a JSON object: (property,value) list
    • e.g. an RDF triple  (e.g. <John,worksFor,UNSW>)
  • objects may contain keys to link to other objects
Tables can be simulated by a collection of "similar" objects.