Navigation-Driven Evaluation of Virtual Mediated Views

Abstract

The MIX mediator systems incorporates a novel framework for navigation-driven evaluation of virtual mediated views. Its architecture allows the on-demand computation of views and query results as the user navigates them. The evaluation scheme minimizes superfluous source access through the use of lazy mediators that translate incoming client navigations on virtual XML views into navigations on lower level mediators or wrapped sources. The proposed demand-driven approach is inevitable for handling up-to-date mediated views of large Web sources or query results. The non-materialization of the query answer is transparent to the client application since clients can navigate the query answer using a subset of the standard DOM API for XML documents. We elaborate on query evaluation in such a framework and show how algebraic plans can be implemented as trees of lazy mediators. Finally, we present a new buffering technique that can mediate between the fine granularity of DOM navigations and the coarse granularity of real world sources. This drastically reduces communication overhead and also simplifies wrapper development. An implementation of the system is available on the Web.