Some types are declared as ``nested'' types. Essence treats these differently than other types, by running a presentation unnesting algorithm or ``Exploder'' on the data rather than a Summarizer. At present Essence can handle files nested in the following formats:
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To customize the presentation unnesting step you can modify the Essence source file harvest/src/gatherer/essence/unnest.c. This file lists the available presentation encodings, and also specifies the unnesting algorithm. Typically, an external program is used to unravel a file into one or more component files (e.g., gunzip, uudecode, and tar).
An Exploder may also be used to explode a file into a stream of SOIF objects. An Exploder program takes a URL as its first command-line argument and a file containing the data to use as its second, and then generates one or more SOIF objects as output. For your convenience, the Exploder type is already defined as a nested type. To save some time, you can use this type and its corresponding Exploder.unnest program rather than modifying the Essence code.
See Appendix C.2 for a detailed example on writing an Exploder. The unnest.c file also contains further information on defining the unnesting algorithms.