43298690
A Test Platform for the INEX Heterogeneous Track
This article presents our work within the INEX 2004 Heterogeneous Track. We focused on taming the structural diversity within the INEX heterogeneous bibliographic corpus. 
 
We demonstrate how semantic models and associated inference techniques can be used to solve the problems raised by the structural diversity within a given XML corpus. The first step automatically extracts a set of concepts from each class of INEX heterogeneous documents. An unified set of concepts is then computed, which synthesizes the interesting concepts from the whole corpus. Individual corpora are connected to the unified set of concepts via conceptual mappings. This approach is implemented as an application of the KadoP platform for peer-to-peer warehousing of XML documents. While this work caters to the structural aspects of XML information retrieval, the extensibility of the KadoP system makes it an interesting test platform in which components developed by several INEX participants could be plugged, exploiting the opportunities of peer-to-peer data and service distribution.
14872110
An Electronic Patient Record "on Steroids": Distributed, Peer-to-Peer, Secure and Privacy-conscious
This chapter investigates how an electronic patient record (EPR) document can be managed by a number of active XML (AXML) peers representing hospitals, MDs, insurance companies, and Department of Health. These peers are living on remote servers, laptops, and mobile devices. Each of them provides integrated information/filtering services, or a combination of these, such as a hospital provides information about visits, while an insurance company gives reimbursement reports, and access control on both of them is enforced by both the regulations of the Department of Health, and their own respective privacy policies. The chapter also illustrates how the distributed data can be queried by different users, and how the specified access control rules are enforced along the way. It also investigates how the queries are executed efficiently—only the relevant/permissible parts of the AXML document are exchanged among peers, an AXML peer can fully or partially evaluate a query by delegating some of the computation to filtering peers or information sources.
2062723
Active XML: A Data-Centric Perspective on Web Services
We propose in this chapter a peer-to-peer architecture that allows for the integration of distributed data and Web services. It relies on a language, Active XML, where documents embed calls to Web services that are used to enrich them, and new Web services may be defined by XQuery queries on such active documents. Embedding calls to functions or even to Web services inside data is not a new idea. Our contribution, however, is to turn them into a powerful tool for data and services integration. In particular, the language includes linguistic features to control the timing of service call activations. Various scenarios are captured, such as mediation, data warehousing and distributed computation. A first prototype is also described.
43817205
Constructing and Querying Peer-to-Peer Warehouses of XML Resources
We present KadoP, a distributed infrastructure for warehousing XML resources in a peer-to-peer framework. KadoP allows users to build a shared, distributed repository of resources such as XML documents, semantic information about such documents, Web services, and collections of such items. KadoP2P builds on distributed hash tables as a peer communication layer, and ActiveXML as a model for constructing and querying the resources in the peer network. We describe KadoP's data model, query language, and query processing paradigm.
2598023
Constructing and querying peer-to-peer warehouses of XML resources
We present KADOP, a distributed infrastructure for warehousing XML resources in a peer-to-peer framework. KADOP allows users to build a shared, distributed repository of resources such as XML documents, semantic information about such documents, Web services, and collections of such items. KADOP leverages several existing technologies and models: it uses distributed hash tables as a peer communication layer, and ActiveXML as a model for constructing and querying the resources in the peer network.
14194921
Active XML, Security and Access Control
XML and Web services are revolutioning the automatic management of distributed information, somewhat in the same way that HTML, Web browsers and search engines modified human access to world wide information. We argue in this paper that the combination of XML and Web services allows for a novel distributed data management paradigm, where the exchanged information mixes materialized and intensional, active, information. We illustrate the flexibility of this approach by presenting Active XML, a language that is based on embedding Web service calls in XML data. We focus on two particular issues, namely security and access control.
140229514
Representing and querying XML with incomplete information
We study the representation and querying of XML with incomplete information. We consider a simple model for XML data and their DTDs, a very simple query language, and a representation system for incomplete information in the spirit of the representations systems developed by Imielinski and Lipski for relational databases. In the scenario we consider, the incomplete information about an XML document is continuously enriched by successive queries to the document. We show that our representation system can represent partial information about the source document acquired by successive queries, and that it can be used to intelligently answer new queries. We also consider the impact on complexity of enriching our representation system or query language with additional features. The results suggest that our approach achieves a practically appealing balance between expressiveness and tractability. The research presented here was motivated by the Xyleme project at INRIA, whose objective it to develop a data warehouse for Web XML documents.
1932947
Representing and querying XML with incomplete information
We study the representation and querying of XML with incomplete information. We consider a simple model for XML data and their DTDs, a very simple query language, and a representation system for incomplete information in the spirit of the representations systems developed by Imielinski and Lipski [1984] for relational databases. In the scenario we consider, the incomplete information about an XML document is continuously enriched by successive queries to the document. We show that our representation system can represent partial information about the source document acquired by successive queries, and that it can be used to intelligently answer new queries. We also consider the impact on complexity of enriching our representation system or query language with additional features. The results suggest that our approach achieves a practically appealing balance between expressiveness and tractability.
2750139
Regular rewriting of active XML and unambiguity
We consider here the exchange of Active XML (AXML) data, i.e., XML documents where some of the data is given explicitly while other parts are given only intensionally as calls to Web services. Peers exchanging AXML data agree on a data exchange schema that specifies in particular which parts of the data are allowed to be intensional. Before sending a document, a peer may need to rewrite it to match the agreed data exchange schema, by calling some of the services and materializing their data. Previous works showed that the rewriting problem is undecidable in the general case and of high complexity in some restricted cases. We argue here that this difficulty is somewhat artificial. Indeed, we study what we believe to be a more adequate, from a practical view point, rewriting problem that is (1) in the spirit of standard 1-unambiguity constraints imposed on XML schema and (2) can be solved by a single pass over the document with a computational device not stronger than a finite state automation. Following previous works, we focus on the core of the problem, i.e., on the problem on words. The results may be extended to (A)XML trees in a straightforward manner.
31547105
Secure Exchange of Modifiable Data and Queries
39011254
Correspondence and Translation for Heterogeneous Data
We presented a specification of the integration of heterogeneous data based on correspondence rules. We showed how a unique specification can served many purposes (including two-way translation) assuming some reasonable restrictions. We claim that the framework and restrictions are acceptable in practice, and in particular one can show that all the document-OODB correspondences/translations of [2, 3] are covered. We are currently working on further substantiating this by more experimentation.