| The work presented in this book came about after we recognized that illdesigned semistructured databases can lead to update anomalies, and there is a strong need for algorithms and tools to help users design storage structures for semistructured data. We have been publishing papers in the design of databases for semistructured data since 1999, and believe that after a number of attempts we have defined a data model that captures the necessary semantics for representing the semantics that are necessary in the design of good semistructured databases.
This book describes a process that initially takes a hardline approach against redundant data, and then relaxes the approach for gains in query performance. The book is suited to both researchers and practitioners in the field of semistructured database design.
Some of the material in this book has been published at international conferences. The material in Chapter 5 was originally based on work presented in [Wu et al., 2001a] and Chapter 6 was originally based on [Chen et al., 2002]. The material in Chapter 3 was published as a technical report at the National University of Singapore [Dobbie et al., 2000].
This major contributions of this book are:
- a comparison of data models for the purpose of designing storage organizations for semistructured data,
- the introduction of a data model, called Object Relationship Attribute Data Model for SemiStructured Data, or ORA-SS, which represents what we believe are the necessary semantics for the design of storage organizations for semistructured data,
- an algorithm for the extraction of a schema from a semistructured data instance, such as an XML document,
- a normalization algorithm for semistructured schemas,
- a set of rules for the validatation of views created on an underlying semistructured instance,
- an algorithm for the denormalization of semistructured schemas.
About the Authors Dr Gillian DOBBIE is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, and Deputy Director of the Software Engineering Programme. [See http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/people/profile.php?id=gdob002]
She received a Ph.D. from the University of Melbourne, an M.Tech.(Hons) and B.Tech.(Hons) in Computer Science from Massey University. She has lectured at Massey University, the University of Melbourne, and Victoria University of Wellington, and held visiting research positions at Griffith University and the National University of Singapore.
Her research interests include formal foundations for databases, object oriented databases, semistructured databases, logic and databases, data warehousing, data mining, access control, e-commerce and data modeling. She has published 27 international refereed journal and conference papers. Some of the publications are listed in http://www.informatik.uni- trier.de/ ley/db/indices/atree/ d/Dobbie:Gillian.html.
She is programme co-chair on ADC05 and ADC06, and has served as programme co-chair on WEBH2001 and WEBH2002. She has served on programme committees for many international conferences including DOOD97, ADC98, DaWaK01, WISE2002, and ACE2003, and has refereed papers for international journals such as TPLP and VLDB. |
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