Hierarchical (Taxonomical) Approach for Handling External Documents in a Database System

This paper presents an approach that can be used to store reference to external documents in a database. The approach, which is hierarchical (taxonomical) in nature, groups each document according to their general to specific attributes. Documents, themselves will be stored in the application server with folder names similar to the tracing of the hierarchical path. Using this method, documents can be easily retrieved by combining the folder names in the hierarchical path. To demonstrate the proposed approach, a database storing maintenance data for storage tanks was developed and discussed in this paper.