06472 Abstracts Collection - XQuery Implementation Paradigms

From 19.11.2006 to 22.11.2006, the Dagstuhl Seminar 06472 ``XQuery Implementation Paradigms'' was held in the International Conference and Research Center (IBFI), Schloss Dagstuhl. During the seminar, several participants presented their current research, and ongoing work and open problems were discussed. Abstracts of the presentations given during the seminar as well as abstracts of seminar results and ideas are put together in this paper. The first section describes the seminar topics and goals in general. Links to extended abstracts or full papers are provided, if available

Data mining framework

The purpose of this document is building a framework for working with clinical data. Vast amounts of clinical records, stored in health repositories, contain information that can be used to improve the quality of health care. However, the information generated from these records depends vastly on the manner, in which the data is arranged. A number of factors need to be considered, before information can be extracted from the patient records. This document deals with the preparation of a framework for the data, before it can be mined.;One of the issues to deal with is information about the patient contained in the clinical records that can be used for identification purposes. A means to create anonymous records is discussed in this document. Once the records have been de-identified, they can be used for data mining. In addition to storing patient records, the document also discusses the possibility of \u27abstracting\u27 information from these documents and storing them in the repository. Information generated from the combination of patient records and abstracted information, could be used to improve the quality of health care.;This document also discusses the possibility of creating a means to query information from the data repository. A prototype application, which provides all these facilities in a form that can be accessed from any remote location, is discussed. In addition, the prospect of using Clinical Document Architecture format to store the clinical records is explored

A Visual Language for Web Querying and Reasoning

As XML is increasingly being used to represent information on the Web, query and reasoning languages for such data are needed. This article argues that in contrast to the navigational approach taken in particular by XPath and XQuery, a positional approach as used in the language Xcerpt is better suited for a straightforward visual representation. The constructs of the pattern- and rule-based query language Xcerpt are introduced and it is shown how the visual representation visXcerpt renders these constructs to form a visual query language for XML

A Query Integrator and Manager for the Query Web

We introduce two concepts: the Query Web as a layer of interconnected queries over the document web and the semantic web, and a Query Web Integrator and Manager (QI) that enables the Query Web to evolve. QI permits users to write, save and reuse queries over any web accessible source, including other queries saved in other installations of QI. The saved queries may be in any language (e.g. SPARQL, XQuery); the only condition for interconnection is that the queries return their results in some form of XML. This condition allows queries to chain off each other, and to be written in whatever language is appropriate for the task. We illustrate the potential use of QI for several biomedical use cases, including ontology view generation using a combination of graph-based and logical approaches, value set generation for clinical data management, image annotation using terminology obtained from an ontology web service, ontology-driven brain imaging data integration, small-scale clinical data integration, and wider-scale clinical data integration. Such use cases illustrate the current range of applications of QI and lead us to speculate about the potential evolution from smaller groups of interconnected queries into a larger query network that layers over the document and semantic web. The resulting Query Web could greatly aid researchers and others who now have to manually navigate through multiple information sources in order to answer specific questions

Reasoning & Querying – State of the Art

Various query languages for Web and Semantic Web data, both for practical use and as an area of research in the scientific community, have emerged in recent years. At the same time, the broad adoption of the internet where keyword search is used in many applications, e.g. search engines, has familiarized casual users with using keyword queries to retrieve information on the internet. Unlike this easy-to-use querying, traditional query languages require knowledge of the language itself as well as of the data to be queried. Keyword-based query languages for XML and RDF bridge the gap between the two, aiming at enabling simple querying of semi-structured data, which is relevant e.g. in the context of the emerging Semantic Web. This article presents an overview of the field of keyword querying for XML and RDF

XGI: A Graphical Interface for XQuery Creation and XML Schema Visualization

XML (Extensible Markup Language) is used in many contexts of modern information technology to facilitate sharing of information between heterogeneous data sources and inter-platform applications. The prevalence of XML implementation in data storage and exchange necessitates a method to adequately query XML data. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is proposing XQuery as the standard querying language for semistructured XML data. XQuery is designed for experienced database programmers, since its syntax and capabilities are analogous to the SQL relational query language. Therefore, the inherent complexity of formulating XQuery statements makes it an intimidating task for anyone, except an expert in the XQuery language, to construct queries. The development of XQuery Graphical Interface (XGI), a visual interface for creating XQuery in a graphical format, is motivated by the need to simplify the query formation for unskilled users and speed up the query construction for expert users. The implementation of XGI is mainly inspired by three existing systems: Query and Reporting Semistructured Data (QURSED), XQuery By Example (XQBE), and XBrain. A review of these systems and many other systems has helped us understand the benefits and drawbacks of various system design approaches, and has assisted us in identifying a set of features for XGI that will successfully reduce the complexity of creating queries in the XQuery language. XGI provides a web interface for users to explore their own XML source data schema, search for specific schema elements, and visually create queries in the XQuery language for the targeted XML data source. A validation of the XGI system has verified its ability to efficiently and accurately create queries for various XML data sources. From the validation, we have recognized some strengths and weaknesses of the XGI system compared to other systems. We also recommend several areas in which XGI can be improved