Page 81 - DLIS405_INFORMATION_STORAGE_AND_RETRIEVAL

Information Storage and Retrieval

Notes their associated locators (indicators to position in the text) are entered into specialist indexing software
which handles the formatting of the index and facilitates the editing phase. The index is then edited
to impose consistency throughout the index.
Indexers must analyze the text to enable presentation of concepts and ideas in the index that may not
be named within the text. The index is intended to help the reader, researcher, or information
professional, rather than the author, find information, so the professional indexer must act as a liaison
between the text and the its ultimate user. Indexing is often done by freelancers hired by authors,
publishers or book packagers. Some publishers and database companies employ indexers. There are
several dedicated, indexing software programs available to assist with the special sorting and copying
needs involved in index preparation. The most widely known include Cindex, macrex, PDF Index
Generator, SkyIndex and TExtract.

Embedded Indexing

Embedded indexing involves including the index headings in the midst of the text itself, but
surrounded by codes so that they are not normally displayed. A usable index is then generated
automatically from the embedded text using the position of the embedded headings to determine the
locators. Thus, when the pagination is changed the index can be regenerated with the new locators.
LaTeX documents support embedded indexes primarily through the makeIndex package. Several
widely-used XML DTDs, including DocBook and TEI, have elements that allow index creation directly
in the XML files. An embedded index requires essentially the same amount of work to create as a
conventional static index; however, this work differs slightly in character as the original source files
are being edited, which may slow the process or prove distracting. An embedded index saves
considerable work if the material will be updated even infrequently.

What is an Index? Explain Indexing process.

8.2 Index Development and Trends

The notion of building indexes and forgetting about them should not be used as philosophy when
thinking about database indexes. Indexes need to be well thought out and tweaked over time. You
need to develop an indexing development lifecycle to build and manage your indexes appropriately
over time. It will give you some ideas that you can use to establish an indexing development lifecycle
for your environment.

In most IT shops, there are at least three different environments: Production,
Quality Assurance/Test, and Development.

Your T-SQL code migrates through these different environments as your code progresses from one
development phase to another, and so should your indexes. Therefore, why not have the following
lifecycle phases for developing and maintaining indexes: Design, Development, Acceptance Testing,
Production, and Maintenance. Let go through each one of these phases and discuss the kinds of
tasks you should consider performing in each phase.

Design Phase

The design phase for indexes is just like the design phase for developing code. In this phase, you
should look at the data model of your new database and consider the processing requirements your

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