Lectures: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23

Overview

Papers:

• Bergholz, Andre. "Extending your Markup: An XML Tutorial." IEEE Internet Computing 4, no. 4 (2003): 74-79.
• Hunter, Jason. X is For XQuery. Oracle Technology Network. Also published in Oracle Magazine, May/June 2003.
• Halevy, Alon, Oren Etzioni, AnHai Doan, Zachary Ives, Jayant Madhavan, Luke McDowell, and Igor Tatarinov. "Crossing the Structure Chasm." In CIDR, Asilomar, CA, January 5-8, 2003.

The first two papers introduce the XML data model and one proposal for a query language over XML. By themselves, XML and XQuery are simply a different way of representing and querying a collection of data that is arguably more flexible and less structured than traditional relational data.

The third paper ("Crossing the Structure Chasm") attempts to address the real challenge that XML pundits frequently claim it solves: dealing with the fact that there is a massive collection of data on the Internet that has no structure and hence cannot easily be queried.

As you read the papers, consider the following questions:

1. In what ways is XML simpler than the relational model? In what ways is it more complex?
2. How does XML help with the "structure chasm" problem? Or does it?
3. What is the fundamental mechanism that the Halevy paper proposes to "cross the structure chasm"?