Desirable properties for XML update mechanisms

The adoption of XML as the default data interchange format and the standardisation of the XPath and XQuery languages has resulted in significant research in the development and implementation of XML databases capable of processing queries efficiently. The ever-increasing deployment of XML in industry and the real-world requirement to support efficient updates to XML documents has more recently prompted research in dynamic XML labelling schemes. In this paper, we provide an overview of the recent research in dynamic XML labelling schemes. Our motivation is to define a set of properties that represent a more holistic dynamic labelling scheme and present our findings through an evaluation matrix for most of the existing schemes that provide update functionality

Investigation into Indexing XML Data Techniques

The rapid development of XML technology improves the WWW, since the XML data has many advantages and has become a common technology for transferring data cross the internet. Therefore, the objective of this research is to investigate and study the XML indexing techniques in terms of their structures. The main goal of this investigation is to identify the main limitations of these techniques and any other open issues. Furthermore, this research considers most common XML indexing techniques and performs a comparison between them. Subsequently, this work makes an argument to find out these limitations. To conclude, the main problem of all the XML indexing techniques is the trade-off between the size and the efficiency of the indexes. So, all the indexes become large in order to perform well, and none of them is suitable for all users’ requirements. However, each one of these techniques has some advantages in somehow

Clustering-based Labelling Scheme - A Hybrid Approach for Efficient Querying and Updating XML Documents

Extensible Markup Language (XML) has become a dominant technology for transferring data through the worldwide web. The XML labelling schemes play a key role in handling XML data efficiently and robustly. Thus, many labelling schemes have been proposed. However, these labelling schemes have limitations and shortcomings. Thus, the aim of this research was to investigate the existing XML labelling schemes and their limitations in order to address the issue of efficiency of XML query performance. This thesis investigated the existing labelling schemes and classified them into three categories based on certain criteria, in order to identify the limitations and challenges of these labelling schemes. Based on the outcomes of this investigation, this thesis proposed a state-of-theart labelling scheme, called clustering-based labelling scheme, to resolve or improve the key limitations such as the efficiency of the XML query processing, labelling XML nodes, and XML updates cost. This thesis argued that using certain existing labelling schemes to label nodes, and using the clustering-based techniques can improve query and labelling nodes efficiency. Theoretically, the proposed scheme is based on dividing the nodes of an XML document into clusters. Two existing labelling schemes, which are the Dewey and LLS labelling schemes, were selected for labelling these clusters and their nodes. Subsequently, the proposed scheme was designed and implemented. In addition, the Dewey and LLS labelling scheme were implemented for the purpose of evaluating the proposed scheme. Subsequently, four experiments were designed in order to test the proposed scheme against the Dewey and LLS labelling schemes. The results of these experiments suggest that the proposed scheme achieved better results than the Dewey and LLS schemes. Consequently, the research hypothesis was accepted overall with few exceptions, and the proposed scheme showed an improvement in the performance and all the targeted features and aspects

05061 Abstracts Collection -- Foundations of Semistructured Data

From 06.02.05 to 11.02.05, the Dagstuhl Seminar 05061 ``Foundations of Semistructured Data\u27\u27 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

Labelling Dynamic XML Documents: A GroupBased Approach

Documents that comply with the XML standard are characterised by inherent ordering and their modelling usually takes the form of a tree. Nowadays, applications generate massive amounts of XML data, which requires accurate and efficient query-able XML database systems. XML querying depends on XML labelling in much the same way as relational databases rely on indexes. Document order and structural information are encoded by labelling schemes, thus facilitating their use by queries without having to access the original XML document. Dynamic XML data, data which changes, complicates the labelling scheme. As demonstrated by much research efforts, it is difficult to allocate unique labels to nodes in a dynamic XML tree so that all structural relationships between the nodes are encoded by the labels. Static XML documents are generally managed with labelling schemes that use simple labels. By contrast, dynamic labelling schemes have extra labelling costs and lower query performance to allow random updates irrespective of the document update frequency. Given that static and dynamic XML documents are often not clearly distinguished, a labelling scheme whose efficiency does not depend on updating frequency would be useful. The GroupBased labelling scheme proposed in this thesis is compatible with static as well as dynamic XML documents. In particular, this scheme has a high performance in processing dynamic XML data updates. What differentiates it from other dynamic labelling schemes is its uniform behaviour irrespective of whether the document is static or dynamic, ability to determine all structural relationships between nodes, and the improved query performance in both types of document. The advantages of the GroupBased scheme in comparison to earlier schemes are highlighted by the experiment results

A Survey on Mapping Semi-Structured Data and Graph Data to Relational Data

The data produced by various services should be stored and managed in an appropriate format for gaining valuable knowledge conveniently. This leads to the emergence of various data models, including relational, semi-structured, and graph models, and so on. Considering the fact that the mature relational databases established on relational data models are still predominant in today's market, it has fueled interest in storing and processing semi-structured data and graph data in relational databases so that mature and powerful relational databases' capabilities can all be applied to these various data. In this survey, we review existing methods on mapping semi-structured data and graph data into relational tables, analyze their major features, and give a detailed classification of those methods. We also summarize the merits and demerits of each method, introduce open research challenges, and present future research directions. With this comprehensive investigation of existing methods and open problems, we hope this survey can motivate new mapping approaches through drawing lessons from eachmodel's mapping strategies, aswell as a newresearch topic - mapping multi-model data into relational tables.Peer reviewe

Pentagonal scheme for dynamic XML prefix labelling

In XML databases, the indexing process is based on a labelling or numbering scheme and generally used to label an XML document to perform an XML query using the path node information. Moreover, a labelling scheme helps to capture the structural relationships during the processing of queries without the need to access the physical document. Two of the main problems for labelling XML schemes are duplicated labels and the cost efficiency of labelling time and size. This research presents a novel dynamic XML labelling scheme, called the Pentagonal labelling scheme, in which data are represented as ordered XML nodes with relationships between them. The update of these nodes from large scale XML documents has been widely investigated and represents a challenging research problem as it means relabelling a whole tree. Our algorithms provide an efficient dynamic XML labelling scheme that supports data updates without duplicating labels or relabelling old nodes. Our work evaluates the labelling process in terms of size and time, and evaluates the labelling scheme’s ability to handle several insertions in XML documents. The findings indicate that the Pentagonal scheme shows a better initial labelling time performance than the compared schemes, particularly when using large XML datasets. Moreover, it efficiently supports random skewed updates, has fast calculations and uncomplicated implementations so efficiently handles updates. Also, it proved its capability in terms of the query performance and in determining the relationships.Libyan governmen

Compressing Labels of Dynamic XML Data using Base-9 Scheme and Fibonacci Encoding

The flexibility and self-describing nature of XML has made it the most common mark-up language used for data representation over the Web. XML data is naturally modelled as a tree, where the structural tree information can be encoded into labels via XML labelling scheme in order to permit answers to queries without the need to access original XML files. As the transmission of XML data over the Internet has become vibrant, it has also become necessary to have an XML labelling scheme that supports dynamic XML data. For a large-scale and frequently updated XML document, existing dynamic XML labelling schemes still suffer from high growth rates in terms of their label size, which can result in overflow problems and/or ambiguous data/query retrievals. This thesis considers the compression of XML labels. A novel XML labelling scheme, named “Base-9”, has been developed to generate labels that are as compact as possible and yet provide efficient support for queries to both static and dynamic XML data. A Fibonacci prefix-encoding method has been used for the first time to store Base-9’s XML labels in a compressed format, with the intention of minimising the storage space without degrading XML querying performance. The thesis also investigates the compression of XML labels using various existing prefix-encoding methods. This investigation has resulted in the proposal of a novel prefix-encoding method named “Elias-Fibonacci of order 3”, which has achieved the fastest encoding time of all prefix-encoding methods studied in this thesis, whereas Fibonacci encoding was found to require the minimum storage. Unlike current XML labelling schemes, the new Base-9 labelling scheme ensures the generation of short labels even after large, frequent, skewed insertions. The advantages of such short labels as those generated by the combination of applying the Base-9 scheme and the use of Fibonacci encoding in terms of storing, updating, retrieving and querying XML data are supported by the experimental results reported herein