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btriev

Boolean Retrieval on Hierarchical Attributes

About

btriev is a query language that answers questions about boolean attributes of objects. For example, "Show me all the books about horror or mystery." and "Which dishes contain cumin and not any variety of tumeric?" are questions btriev can answer.

Install

npm install btriev

Example

const btriev = require('btriev');

const tags = [
                {
                  id: 1,
                  name: 'Action',
                },
                {
                  id: 2,
                  name: 'Superhero',
                },
                {
                  id: 3,
                  name: 'Adventure',
                },
                {
                  id: 4,
                  name: 'Kung Fu',
                },
                {
                  id: 5,
                  name: 'Western',
                },
                {
                  id: 6,
                  name: 'Mystery',
                }
             ];

const edges = [
                {
                  from: 1,
                  to: 2,
                },
                {
                  from: 1,
                  to: 3,
                },
                {
                  from: 1,
                  to: 4,
                },
                {
                  from: 3,
                  to: 5,
                },
              ];

const tagHierarchy = btriev.TagHierarchy.createFromEdgeList(edges, tags);
const dataStore = btriev.DataStore.fromUnsortedIndex({
  1: [10],
  2: [11, 12],
  4: [13, 15],
  5: [14],
  6: [10, 12, 14]
});

btriev.evaluate('Action* AND Mystery', dataStore, tagHierarchy); // [10, 12, 14]
btriev.evaluate('(Superhero or "Kung Fu") and not Mystery', dataStore, tagHierarchy); // [11, 13, 15]

Docs

Index

DataStore is btriev's inverted index implementation. It stores which tags correspond to which data. This data structure interacts entirely with tag and datum ids (i.e. should be unique Numbers).

It is strongly recommended to construct a DataStore using its static constructor, fromUnsortedIndex, which takes an object argument mapping tag ids to an array of data ids. Data ids do not have to be sorted or unique for this constructor. This constructor offers a second argument allDataIds, for specifying the full set of data ids in the event some datum have no tags assigned.

Tag hierarchy

TagHierarchy is btriev's representation of a tag graph. It stores a lookup from tag names to tag ids and knows how to traverse the tags. Contrary to the name, TagHierarchy can represent cyclical graphs, although this is not the expected use case.

TagHierarchy is most easily constructed from its static constructor createFromEdgeList. The first argument it accepts is an array of objects with to and from attributes; these represent edges between tag ids. The second argument is an array of objects with id and name attributes, representing the set of all tags.

Querying

Within a query, operators are case insensitive. Tag names are matched on exact string equality and may be enclosed in double quotes.

Operators are evaluated in order of precedence (see Operators section). Data operators are commutative and have distinct precedence, so the local (left to right) ordering of operations is unspecified. The explosion operator has distinct precedence and is idempotent for subsequent calls, so ordering is irrelevant. The path operator is the only operator where order of operations is important; as expected, it evaluates tags left to right (e.g. grandparent > parent > child).

Operators

In increasing order of precedence:

  • OR computes the union of data matching the left and right expressions
  • AND computes the intersection of data matching the left and right expressions
  • NOT computes the negation of data matching the right expression
  • * (explosion operator) expands the left tag to include all "child" tags (as determined by a graph traversal)
  • > (path operator) specifies an exact path to a tag (useful for duplicate tag names).
  • " is used to quote tag names. useful for tag names containing operator keywords. Escape a double quote within double quotes using the sequence \".
  • ( & ) contain expressions and specify the order of execution.

AND, OR, and NOT are data operators (they operate on the data index), while * and > are tag operators (they operate on the tag hierarchy).

Exceptions

ParseErrors contain a message and offer a getLocation() method for determining string indices where the error originates.

Options

allowUnknownTags is an option of evaluate which determines how unknown tag names (i.e. those not in the tag hierarchy) are handled during query parsing and evaluation. When true, unknown tags are evaluated to an empty array of data ids. When this option is false, an exception will be thrown.

Internals / External development

btriev exposes many of its internals, namely its query lexer and parser. This decision allows external tools to develop on top of btriev.

btriev