Abstract
The steady growth of the amount of data published on the World Wide Web has led to a number of attempts to provide effective Web querying, as a complement to conventional navigation techniques. In this paper, we propose to support WWW querying by specifying both logical and navigational aspects of a Web site through the unifying notion of schema. Schemata are a powerful tool for classifying and maintaining WWW data as well as for semantics-aware search on the Web. Moreover, schema availability is the basis for an effective flexible querying mechanism.
Following the style of such languages as Good and G-Log, the WG-Log language described in the paper uniformly represents site schemata, instances and queries as graphs. Gracefully supporting schemata that are huge or subject to change, WG-Log adequately represents data whose structure is less rigid than that of traditional databases; moreover, it allows for a uniform representation of flexible queries and views, the latter expressing customized access structures to the site information.
This work has been partially supported by the INTERDATA project from Italian Ministry of University and Scientific Research, 1997.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
P. Atzeni and G. Mecca. To Weave the Web. In Proceedings of VLDB'97, pages 206–215, 1997.
P. Buneman, S. Davidson, M. Fernandez, and D. Suciu. Adding structure to unstructured data. In Proc. of the ICDT 1997, pages 336–350. Springer Verlag, 1997.
E. Damiani and L. Tanca. Semantic Approach to Structuring and Querying the Web Sites. In Procedings of 7th IFIP Work. Conf. on Database Semantics (DS-97), 1997.
P. Fraternali and P. Paolini. Autoweb: Automatic Generation of Web Applications from Declarative Specifications. http://www.ing.unico.it/Autoweb.
H. García-Molina, Y. Papakonstantinou, D. Quass, A. Rajaraman, Y. Saviv, J. Ullman, V. Vassalos, and J. Widom. The TSIMMIS Approach to Mediation: Data Models and Languages. In Proceedings of JIIS, volume 2, pages 117–132, 1997.
F. Garzotto, L. Mainetti, and P. Paolini. Hypermedia design, analysis, and evaluation issues. Commun. ACM, 38(8):74–86, Aug. 1995. http://www.acm.org/pubs/toc/Abstracts/0001-0782/208349.html.
F. Giannotti, G. Manco, and D. Pedreschi. A deductive data model for representing and querying semistructured data. In Proceedings of the ILCP 97 Post-Conference Workshop on Logic Programming Tools for Internet Applications, Leuwen, 1997.
T. Isakowitz, E. A. Stohr, and P. Balasubramanian. RMM: A methodology for structured hypermedia design. Commun. ACM, 38(8):34–44, Aug. 1995. http://www.acm.org/pubs/toc/Abstracts/0001-0782/208346.html.
D. Konopnicki and O. Shmueli. W3QL: A Query System for the World Wide Web. In Proceedings of the 21th International Conf. on Very Large Databases, pages 54–65, Zurich, 1995.
L. V. S. Lakshmanan, F. Sadri, and I. N. Subramanian. A declarative language for querying and restructuring the Web. In IEEE, editor, Sixth Int. Workshop on Research Issues in Data Engineering, February, 1996, New Orleans, pages 12–21. IEEE Computer Society Press, 1996.
A. O. Mendelzon, G. A. Mihaila, and T. Milo. Querying the World Wide Web. In IEEE, editor, Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Information Systems: December 18–20, 1996, Miami Beach, Florida, pages 1–10. IEEE Computer Society Press, 1996.
A. O. Mendelzon and P. T. Wood. Finding regular simple paths in graph databases. In Proceedings of the 15th Conference on Very Large Databases, Morgan Kaufman pubs. (Los Altos CA), Amsterdam, pages 185–193, Aug. 1989.
R. Milner. Operational and algebraic semantics of concurrent processes. In J. van Leewen, editor, Handbook of Theoretical Computer Science, volume B: Formal Models and Semantics, chapter 19, pages 1201–1242. The MIT Press, New York, N.Y., 1990.
B. Oliboni, L. Tanca, and D. Veronese. Using WG-Log to represent semistructured data: the example of OEM. In Proocedings of the Italian National Conference ”Sistemi evoluti per Base di Dati (SEBD98)”, Ancona, June 1998.
J. Paredaens, P. Peelman, and L. Tanca. G-log: A declarative graphical query specification language. Technical report, Antwerpen, 1991.
J. Paredaens, P. Peelman, and L. Tanca. G-Log: A graph-based query language. IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, 7(3):436–453, June 1995.
D. Park. Concurrency and automata on infinite sequences. In P. Deussen, editor, Theoretical Computer Science: 5th GI-Conference, Karlsruhe, volume 104 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 167–183, Berlin, Heidelberg, and New York, Mar. 1981. Springer-Verlag.
D. Saccà and C. Zaniolo. Stable models and non-determinism in logic programs with negation. In Proceedings of the 9th ACM SIGACT-SIGMOD-SIGART Symposium on Principles of Database Systems, pages 205–217, Nashville, TE, Apr. 1990. ACM Press.
D. Suciu. Management of semistructured data. In Foreword to a special section of the ACM Sigmod Record, volume 26. ACM Press, Dec. 1997.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1998 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Comai, S., Damiani, E., Posenato, R., Tanca, L. (1998). A schema-based approach to modeling and querying WWW data. In: Andreasen, T., Christiansen, H., Larsen, H.L. (eds) Flexible Query Answering Systems. FQAS 1998. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1495. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0055995
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0055995
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-65082-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-49655-7
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive