State-of-the-art database systems manage and process a variety of complex objects, including strings and trees. For such objects equality comparisons are often not meaningful and must be replaced by similarity comparisons. This book describes the concepts and techniques to incorporate similarity into database systems. We start out by discussing the properties of strings and trees, and identify the edit distance as the de facto standard for comparing complex objects. Since the edit distance is computationally expensive, token-based distances have been introduced to speed up edit distance...
State-of-the-art database systems manage and process a variety of complex objects, including strings and trees. For such objects equality comparisons ...
