Document storage and retrieval in a neural database

A database of the leech nervous system has been developed. The end users of the database will mainly be neuroscientists, especially those studying the invertebrate nervous system. It is mainly a document database, collecting papers on the leech nervous system, which is maintained in a largely automatic fashion. The database is composed of three subsystems: (1) an object oriented, relational database management (sub)system, devoted to storing and maintaining the data and to provide input/output tools to the end users; (2) a document understanding subsystem, which transforms paper documents into an electronic format which can be stored in the database; (3) an information retrieval subsystem, through which end users extract information from the database. The actual system has been developed as a combination of original modules (the document segmentation module, the field extraction module, parts of the information retrieval subsystem, the user interfaces) with commercial products (the database management subsystem, the OCR module), and a relevant part of the effort has been put into the integration of the several modules into a common framework.