16303108
Active XML: Peer-to-Peer Data and Web Services Integration
Publisher Summary The content of an Active eXtensible Markup Language (AXML) document is dynamic, because it is possible to specify when a service call should be activated (for example, when needed, every hour, etc.), and for how long its result should be considered valid. Thus, this simple mechanism allows capturing and combining different styles of data integration, such as warehousing and mediation. To fully take advantage of the use of services, AXML also allows calling continuous services (that provide streams of answers) and services supporting intentional data (AXML document including service calls) as parameters and/or result. The latter feature leads to powerful, recursive integration schemes. The AXML framework is centered on AXML documents , which are XML documents that may contain calls to Web services. When calls included in an AXML document are fired, the latter is enriched by the corresponding results.
9888780
DBGlobe: a service-oriented P2P system for global computing
The challenge of peer-to-peer computing goes beyond simple file sharing. In the DBGlobe project, we view the multitude of peers carrying data and services as a superdatabase. Our goal is to develop a data management system for modeling, indexing and querying data hosted by such massively distributed, autonomous and possibly mobile peers. We employ a service-oriented approach, in that data are encapsulated in services. Direct querying of data is also supported by an XML-based query language. In this paper, we present our research results along the following topics: (a) infrastructure support, including mobile peers and the creation of context-dependent communities, (b) metadata management for services and peers, including location-dependent data, (c) filters for efficiently routing path queries on hierarchical data, and (d) querying using the AXML language that incorporates service calls inside XML documents.
14211244
Querying and Updating Probabilistic Information in XML
We present in this paper a new model for representing probabilistic information in a semi-structured (XML) database, based on the use of probabilistic event variables. This work is motivated by the need of keeping track of both confidence and lineage of the information stored in a semi-structured warehouse. For instance, the modules of a (Hidden Web) content warehouse may derive information concerning the semantics of discovered Web services that is by nature not certain. Our model, namely the fuzzy tree model, supports both querying (tree pattern queries with join) and updating (transactions containing an arbitrary set of insertions and deletions) over probabilistic tree data. We highlight its expressive power and discuss implementation issues.
847694
Reasoning about XML update constraints
We introduce in this paper a class of constraints for describing howan XML document can evolve, namely XML update constraints. For these constraints, we study the implication problem, giving algorithms and complexity results for constraints of varying expressive power. Besides classical constraint implication, we also consider an instance-based approach. More precisely, we study implication with respect to a current tree instance, resulting from a series of unknown updates. The main motivation of our work is reasoning about data integrity under update restrictions in contexts where owners may lose control over their data, such as in publishing or exchange.
6193947
Schema-driven Customization of Web Services
Publisher Summary This chapter discusses schema-driven customization of Web services. Web services are emerging as a standard mean of publishing and accessing data on the Web, by providing a standard XML-based protocol to invoke remote programs over the Web (simple object access protocol (SOAP)), along with a standard language to describe them (web service description language (WSDL)). XML is becoming the universal format for data exchange between applications. Recently, the use of XML documents, where some of the data is given explicitly, while other parts are defined by programs that generate the relevant data, started gaining popularity. This chapter refers to such documents as intensional documents. Materialization is the process of invoking some of the programs included in an XML document and replacing them by their results. The goal of this demonstration is to advocate for the exchange of such intensional XML documents between applications, and to illustrate the new possibilities and the great flexibility they bring to application design.
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.
1109183
XML Data Integration with Identification
Data integration is the problem of combining data residing at different sources, and providing the user with a virtual view, called global schema, which is independent from the model and the physical origin of the sources. Whereas many data integration systems and theoretical works have been proposed for relational data, not much investigation has been focused yet on XML data integration. Our goal is therefore to address some of its related issues. In particular, we highlight two major issues that emerge in the XML context: (i) the global schema may be characterized by a set of constraints, expressed by means of a DTD and XML integrity constraints, (ii) the concept of node identity requires to introduce semantic criteria to identify nodes coming from different sources. We propose a formal framework for XML data integration systems based on an expressive XML global schema, a set of XML data sources and a set of mappings specified by means of a simple tree language. Then, we define an identification function that aims at globally identifying nodes coming from different sources. Finally, we propose algorithms to answer queries under different assumptions for the mappings.
52829094
Distributed Information Management with XML and Web Services
XML and Web services are revolutioning the automatic management of distributed information, somewhat in the same way HTML, Web browser and search engines modified human access to world wide information. To illustrate, we present Active XML that is based on embedding Web service calls inside XML documents. We mention two particular applications that take advantage of this new technology and novel research issues in this setting. This paper is based primarily on research at INRIA-Futurs in the Gemo Group, around XML and Web services (in particular, the Xyleme, Active XML and Spin projects).
2990663
Extracting schema from semistructured data
Semistructured data is characterized by the lack of any fixed and rigid schema, although typically the data has some implicit structure. While the lack of fixed schema makes extracting semistructured data fairly easy and an attractive goal, presenting and querying such data is greatly impaired. Thus, a critical problem is the discovery of the structure implicit in semistructured data and, subsequently, the recasting of the raw data in terms of this structure. In this paper, we consider a very general form of semistructured data based on labeled, directed graphs. We show that such data can be typed using the greatest fixpoint semantics of monadic datalog programs. We present an algorithm for approximate typing of semistructured data. We establish that the general problem of finding an optimal such typing is NP-hard, but present some heuristics and techniques based on clustering that allow efficient and near-optimal treatment of the problem. We also present some preliminary experimental results.
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.