ABSTRACT
People live in an interconnected world of information technology (IT), where all sorts of data are created, stored, processed, analyzed, and applied to great benefits. An important task in any computer program is to organize and manipulate data correctly and efficiently. In a real sense, programming consists of two main activities, designing and implementing algorithms and creating and manipulating data. Markup makes documents easy to communicate among heterogeneous platforms and efficient to process by programs. Treating textual documents as data items is an important aspect of IT. The effectiveness and efficiency of a program depend on both its algorithms and its data structures/representations. A relational database usually consists of multiple tables organized to efficiently represent and interrelate the data. Advances in digital and information technologies, especially in the sensing and gathering of data in many different areas, result in collections of data that are extremely large.
