Cost-benefit analysis of Web bag in a Web warehouse

Sets and bags are closely related structures and have been studied in relational databases. A bag is different from a set in that it is sensitive to the number of times an element occurs, while a set is not. In this paper, we introduce the concept of a Web bag in the context of a World Wide Web warehouse called WHOWEDA (WareHouse Of WEb DAta) which we are currently building. Informally, a Web bag is a Web table which allows multiple occurrences of identical Web types. A Web bag helps one to discover useful knowledge from a Web table, such as visible documents or Web sites (i.e. documents/sites which can be reached by many paths), luminous documents (i.e. documents with many outgoing links) and luminous paths (i.e. frequently traversed paths). In this paper, we provide a cost-benefit analysis of materializing Web bags as compared to Web tables with distinct Web tuples.