[December 17, 1999] "Reports from XML'99." By Edd Dumbill. From XML.com (December 16, 1999). "Last week XML.com provided coverage of the GCA's XML'99 conference in Philadelphia. Over 2,200 delegates gathered to attend tutorials, see the products on show in the expo and listen to the presentations. Edd Dumbill and Simon St.Laurent reported daily from the show on XML.com, highlighting the major news and sessions together with information on interesting and innovative products from the expo. Lisa Rein was also out and about on the conference floor, gathering opinions from delegates on recent happenings in the XML world."
[December 17, 1999] "XML still waiting for the spotlight." By Michael Lattig. In InfoWorld (December 17, 1999). "Although Extensible Markup Language (XML) is on the lips and in the marketing materials of almost any vendor whose products touch corporate data, the XML '99 show in Philadelphia this week proved there is still much work to be done. The reasons offered for the disconnect between XML's perceived value and the reality that users are still struggling to understand how it should be implemented were numerous, but the main stumbling block seems to be a lack of vendors offering real-world XML solutions. 'My estimation is the major breakthrough needed is to get critical mass of vendors to focus their attention on XML and allow us to move forward with turnkey projects,' said Chris Wolff, vice president of publishing technologies at the West Group, an information provider for legal professionals, in Egan, Minn. That critical mass, noted Wolff, needs to start with the development of more robust tools for XML development. Many tools vendors, however, do not seem to feel the urgency to jump on the XML bandwagon."
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[December 08, 1999] "Who Will Control XML? As XML takes off, standards processes and direction questions won't go away." By Mary Jo Foley. In Smart Reseller (December 08, 1999). "Microsoft and Sun Microsystems agree that XML, the Extensible Markup Language, is key to their future products and strategies. But in true rivalry fashion, the two agree to disagree on which groups are best suited for making sure XML remains a standard and doesn't splinter. At the XML '99 conference in Philadelphia this week, Sun and Microsoft participated in a vendor keynote panel, where they outlined their respective companies' Internet plans, which intimately revolve around XML..."
[August 05, 1999] "An XML-Based Wrapper Generator for Web Information Extraction." By Ling Liu, Wei Han, David Buttler, Calton Pu, and Wei Tang. [Oregon Graduate Institute of Science and Technology, Department of Computer Science and Engineering; P.O. Box 91000 Portland, Oregon 97291-1000 USA; Email: weihan,buttler,calton, wtangg flingliu@cse.ogi.edu.] In SIGMOD Record Volume 28, Number 2 (June 1999), pages 540-543 (with 7 references). Published paper from the Proceedings of the 1999 ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data, May 31 - June 3, 1999, Philadelphia, PA, USA. "We have developed a wrapper generation system, called XWrap, for semi-automatic construction of wrappers for Web information sources. The system contains a library of commonly used functions, such as receiving queries from applications, handling of filter queries, and packaging results. It also contains some source-specific facilities that are in charge of mapping a mediator query to a remote connection call to fetch the relevant pages and translating the retrieved page(s) into a more structured format (such as XML documents or relational tables). A distinct feature of our wrapper generator is its ability to provide an XML-enabled, feedback-based, interactive wrapper construction facility for Internet information sources. By XML-enabled we mean that the extraction of information content from the Web pages will be captured in XML form and the process of filter queries is performed against XML documents. By feedback-based we mean that the wrapper construction process will be revisited and tuned according to the feedback received by the wrapper manager. The philosophy behind our 'XML-enabled' wrapper generation methodology is to develop mechanisms that provides a clean separation of the semantic knowledge of information extraction from the wrapper code generation using a rule-based approach. More concretely, the wrapper generator first exploits formatting information in Web pages to hypothesize the underlying semantic structure of a page, and then encode the hypothetical structure and the information extraction knowledge of the web pages in a rule-based declarative language designed specifically for XWrap information extraction. From the set of information extraction rules and the XML-templates derived throughout the XWrap walkthrough sessions, the system constructs a wrapper program that facilitates both the tasks of querying of a semi-structured Web source and integrating it with other Web information sources." For some related documents, see also a publications listing.
[August 05, 1999] "XML-Based Information Mediation with MIX." By Chaitan Baru, Amarnath Gupta, Bertram Ludäscher, Richard Marciano, Yannis Papakonstantinou, Pavel Velikhov, and Vincent Chu. [University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093; Email: fbaru,gupta,ludaesch marcianog@sdsc.edu, fyannis pvelikhog@cs.ucsd.edu.] In ACM SIGMOD Record Volume 28, Number 2 (June 1999), pages 597-599. Published paper from the Proceedings of the 1999 ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data, May 31 - June 3, 1999, Philadelphia, PA, USA. "As part of the MIX (Mediation of Information based on XML) Project at the San Diego Supercomputer Center and the University of California, San Diego, the MIX mediator system (MIXm) has been developed. MIXm is a fully XML-based mediator prototype whose graphical user interface BBQ (Blended Browsing and Querying) integrates the browsing and querying of XML data. Powerful grouping and ordering operators are supported by means of a novel collection list construct. BBQ automatically generates XML queries from the graphical query specification given by the user. The system solely relies on the XMAS (XML Matching And Structuring Language) query language for extracting XML data (both from the mediator and from the sources). An algorithm for DTD (document type definition) inference for certain views has been developed. In the demonstration, the system is not only presented from the end user's (BBQ) perspective, but also details of the generated XMAS queries and algebra expressions can be shown. . . MIXm uses XML as the common model for data exchange. Mediator views are expressed in XMAS (XML Matching And Structuring Language), a declarative XML query language. To facilitate user-friendly query formulation and for optimization purposes, MIXm employs XML DTDs as a structural description (in effect, a 'schema') of the exchanged data. The novel features of the system include: (1) Data exchange and integration solely relies on XML, i.e., instance and schema information is represented by XML documents and XML DTDs, respectively. XML queries are denoted in XMAS, which builds upon ideas of languages like XML-QL, MSL, Yat, and UnQL. Additionally, XMAS features powerful grouping and order constructs for generating new integrated XML 'objects' from existing ones. (2) The graphical user interface BBQ (Blended Browsing and Querying) is driven by the mediator view DTD and integrates browsing and querying of XML data. Complex queries can be constructed in an intuitive way, resembling QBE. Due to the nested nature of XML data and DTDs, BBQ provides graphical means to specify the nesting and grouping of query results. (3) Query evaluation can be demand-driven, i.e., by the user's navigation into the mediated view." For additional description and references, see "MIX - Mediation of Information Using XML."
[July 26, 1999] "On Views and XML." By Serge Abiteboul. Pages 1-9 (with 34 references) in Proceedings of the Eighteenth ACM SIGACT-SIGMOD-SIGART Symposium on Principles of Database Systems. PODS '99. Held May 31 - June 2, 1999, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. New York: ACM Press, 1999. ISBN: 1-58113-062-7. "The notion of views is essential in databases, [for] it allows various users to see data from different viewpoints. In the present paper, we informally present works of the author on the topic. Instead of addressing the issue of views in a classical database setting, the paper focuses on XML and looks at these various works in the context of a system of views for XML. The Web has revolutionized the electronic publication of data. It has relied primarily on HTML that emphasizes a hypertext document approach. More recently, XML, although originally a document mark-up language, is promoting an approach more focused on data exchange. In XML, explicit structuring is enforced and presentation is separated from the data content. For data sources containing information with some structure, it is therefore more appropriate to use XML rather than HTML to export their data to the Web. When data is exported via XML, the problem of views becomes essential. Indeed, views in this setting are even more crucial than in standard database applications because (i) one often has to integrate heterogeneous sources and also (ii) views provide the means to add a structured interface on top of some otherwise (more chaotic) semistructured data. In some sense, a language already allows to define views for XML documents, namely XSL. XSL is the current (still unstable) W3C proposal for expressing stylesheets. Although primarily targeted towards presentation, XSL allows to transform/restructure XML documents using templates rules. We are discussing such restructuring here. However, we will ignore presentation issues and will consider more general views than offered by XSL. A view specification for XML data' will primarily rely, like for relational views, on a data model and a query language. We will argue that the data model should be as the ODMG model based on objects. In general, we will argue that XML view technology should borrow a lot from the object database view technology. However, XML data is not regular like in the relational or object models, which leads to considering semistructured data models. We will argue that this should not be to the detriment of regularity and structure, when it is known. Furthermore, we will argue that the data model should allow the management of incomplete information. . . A central issue for the definition of views for XML data is the query language. Unfortunately, there is no standard yet for such a language although the activity invested towards obtaining one is rather intense and a standard should emerge soon." For related research on [XML and] views, see Serge Abiteboul's Home Page and the author's publications listing. 2ff7e9595c
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