Four Lessons in Versatility or How Query Languages Adapt to the Web

Exposing not only human-centered information, but machine-processable data on the Web is one of the commonalities of recent Web trends. It has enabled a new kind of applications and businesses where the data is used in ways not foreseen by the data providers. Yet this exposition has fractured the Web into islands of data, each in different Web formats: Some providers choose XML, others RDF, again others JSON or OWL, for their data, even in similar domains. This fracturing stifles innovation as application builders have to cope not only with one Web stack (e.g., XML technology) but with several ones, each of considerable complexity. With Xcerpt we have developed a rule- and pattern based query language that aims to give shield application builders from much of this complexity: In a single query language XML and RDF data can be accessed, processed, combined, and re-published. Though the need for combined access to XML and RDF data has been recognized in previous work (including the W3C’s GRDDL), our approach differs in four main aspects: (1) We provide a single language (rather than two separate or embedded languages), thus minimizing the conceptual overhead of dealing with disparate data formats. (2) Both the declarative (logic-based) and the operational semantics are unified in that they apply for querying XML and RDF in the same way. (3) We show that the resulting query language can be implemented reusing traditional database technology, if desirable. Nevertheless, we also give a unified evaluation approach based on interval labelings of graphs that is at least as fast as existing approaches for tree-shaped XML data, yet provides linear time and space querying also for many RDF graphs. We believe that Web query languages are the right tool for declarative data access in Web applications and that Xcerpt is a significant step towards a more convenient, yet highly efficient data access in a “Web of Data”

A schema-only approach to validate XML schema mappings

Since the emergence of the Web, the ability to map XML data between different data sources has become crucial. Defining a mapping is however not a fully automatic process. The designer needs to figure out whether the mapping is what was intended. Our approach to this validation consists of defining and checking certain desirable properties of mappings. We translate the XML schemas and the mapping into first-order logic formalism and apply a reasoning mechanism to check the desirable properties automatically, without assuming any particular instantiation of the schemas.Preprin

Validation of schema mappings with nested queries

With the emergence of the Web and the wide use of XML for representing data, the ability to map not only flat relational but also nested data has become crucial. The design of schema mappings is a semi-automatic process. A human designer is needed to guide the process, choose among mapping candidates, and successively refine the mapping. The designer needs a way to figure out whether the mapping is what was intended. Our approach to mapping validation allows the designer to check whether the mapping satisfies certain desirable properties. In this paper, we focus on the validation of mappings between nested relational schemas, in which the mapping assertions are either inclusions or equalities of nested queries. We focus on the nested relational setting since most XML’s Document Type Definitions (DTDs) can be represented in this model. We perform the validation by reasoning on the schemas and mapping definition. We take into account the integrity constraints defined on both the source and target schema.Preprin

Generating Nested XML Documents with Dtd from Relational Views

Converting relational database into XML is increasing daily for publishing and exchanging data on the web. Most of the current approaches and tools for generating XML documents from relational database generate flat XML documents that contain data redundancy which leads to produce a massive data on the web. Other approaches assume that the relational database for generating nested XML documents is normalized. In addition, these approaches have problem that lies in the difficult of how to specify the parent elements from the children elements in the nested XML document. Moreover, most of the current approaches and tools do not generate nested XML documents automatically. They require the user to specify the constraints and the schema of the target document. This research proposes an approach to automatically generate nested XML documents from flat relational database views that are unnormalized. The research aims to reduce data redundancy and storage sizes for the generated XML documents. The proposed approach consists of three steps. The first step is converting flat relational view into nested relational view. The second is generating DTD from the nested relational view. The third is generating nested XML document from the nested relational view. The proposed approach is evaluated and compared to other approaches such as NeT, CoT, and Cost-Based and tools such as Allora, Altova, and DbToXml with respect to two measurements: data redundancy and storage size of the document. The first measurement includes several parameters that are number of data values, elements, attributes, and tags. Based on the results of comparing the proposed approach to several other approaches and tools, the proposed approach is more efficient for reducing data redundancy and storage size of XML documents. It can reduce data redundancy and storage size by approximately 50% and 55%, respectively

Storing and Querying Probabilistic XML Using a Probabilistic Relational DBMS

This work explores the feasibility of storing and querying probabilistic XML in a probabilistic relational database. Our approach is to adapt known techniques for mapping XML to relational data such that the possible worlds are preserved. We show that this approach can work for any XML-to-relational technique by adapting a representative schema-based (inlining) as well as a representative schemaless technique (XPath Accelerator). We investigate the maturity of probabilistic rela- tional databases for this task with experiments with one of the state-of- the-art systems, called Trio

PATAXÓ: A Framework to Allow Updates Through XML Views

XML has become an important medium for data exchange, and is frequently used as an interface to (i.e., a view of) a relational database. Although a lot of work has been done on querying relational databases through XML views, the problem of updating relational databases through XML views has not received much attention. In this work, we map XML views expressed using a subset of XQuery to a corresponding set of relational views. Thus, we transform the problem of updating relational databases through XML views into a classical problem of updating relational databases through relational views. We then show how updates on the XML view are mapped to updates on the corresponding relational views. Existing work on updating relational views can then be leveraged to determine whether or not the relational views are updatable with respect to the relational updates, and if so, to translate the updates to the underlying relational database

Supporting SPARQL Update Queries in RDF-XML Integration

The Web of Data encourages organizations and companies to publish their data according to the Linked Data practices and offer SPARQL endpoints. On the other hand, the dominant standard for information exchange is XML. The SPARQL2XQuery Framework focuses on the automatic translation of SPARQL queries in XQuery expressions in order to access XML data across the Web. In this paper, we outline our ongoing work on supporting update queries in the RDF-XML integration scenario.Comment: 13th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC '14