Collection (Terrier Information Retrieval Platform 5.5 API)

All Superinterfaces:

java.lang.AutoCloseable, java.io.Closeable

All Known Implementing Classes:

CollectionDocumentList, MultiDocumentFileCollection, SimpleFileCollection, SimpleMedlineXMLCollection, SimpleXMLCollection, TRECCollection, TRECUTFCollection, TRECWebCollection, TwitterJSONCollection, WARC018Collection, WARC09Collection, WARC10Collection
```
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

All Methods Instance Methods Abstract Methods
Modifier and Type	Method	Description
`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.