org.terrier.indexing
Interface Collection

All Superinterfaces:

java.io.Closeable

All Known Implementing Classes:

SimpleFileCollection, SimpleMedlineXMLCollection, SimpleXMLCollection, TRECCollection, TRECUTFCollection, TRECWebCollection, WARC018Collection, WARC09Collection

public interface Collection
extends java.io.Closeable

This interface encapsulates the most fundamental concept to indexing with Terrier - a Collection. Anyone using Terrier to encapuslate a new source of data (a corpus, colllection etc) needs to create an object which implements this Collection interface.
The Collection interface is essentially an Iterator over a series of documents. It generates Document objects for each next document requested from the collection. It is aware of the type of Document objects available, and how to instantiate them.
Terrier core provides two Collection implementation: TRECCollection and SimpleFileCollection.

Author:

Craig Macdonald

Method Summary

boolean	endOfCollection() Returns true if the end of the collection has been reached
Document	getDocument() Get the document object representing the current document.
boolean	nextDocument() Move the collection to the start of the next document.
void	reset() Resets the Collection iterator to the start of the collection.

Methods inherited from interface java.io.Closeable

close

Method Detail

nextDocument

boolean nextDocument()

Move the collection to the start of the next document.

Returns:

boolean true if there exists another document in the collection, otherwise it returns false.

getDocument

Document getDocument()

Get the document object representing the current document.

Returns:

Document the current document;

endOfCollection

boolean endOfCollection()

Returns true if the end of the collection has been reached

Returns:

boolean true if the end of collection has been reached, otherwise it returns false.

reset

void reset()

Resets the Collection iterator to the start of the collection.