Skip to main content
Springer Nature Link
Log in

The Active XML project: an overview

  • Regular Paper
  • Published:
The VLDB Journal Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

This paper provides an overview of the Active XML project developed at INRIA over the past five years. Active XML (AXML, for short), is a declarative framework that harnesses Web services for distributed data management, and is put to work in a peer-to-peer architecture. The model is based on AXML documents, which are XML documents that may contain embedded calls to Web services, and on AXML services, which are Web services capable of exchanging AXML documents. An AXML peer is a repository of AXML documents that acts both as a client by invoking the embedded service calls, and as a server by providing AXML services, which are generally defined as queries or updates over the persistent AXML documents. The approach gracefully combines stored information with data defined in an intensional manner as well as dynamic information. This simple, rather classical idea leads to a number of technically challenging problems, both theoretical and practical. In this paper, we describe and motivate the AXML model and language, overview the research results obtained in the course of the project, and show how all the pieces come together in our implementation.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Subscribe and save

Springer+ Basic
$34.99 /Month
  • Get 10 units per month
  • Download Article/Chapter or eBook
  • 1 Unit = 1 Article or 1 Chapter
  • Cancel anytime
Subscribe now

Buy Now

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

Chapter © 2017

References

  1. Abiteboul, S., Abrams Z., Milo, T.: Diagnosis of asynchronous discrete event systems—datalog to the rescue! In: Proc. of ACM PODS (2005)

  2. Abiteboul, S., Alexe, B., Benjelloun, O., Cautis, B., Fundulaki, I., Milo, T., Sahuguet, A.: An Electronic patient record on steroids: distributed, peer to peer, secure and privacy conscious (demo). In: Proc. of VLDB (2004)

  3. Abiteboul, S., Amann, B., Baumgarten, J., Benjelloun, O., Ngoc, F.D., Milo, T.: Schema-driven customization of Web services (demo). In: Proc. of VLDB (2003)

  4. Abiteboul, S., Amann, B., Cluet, S., Eyal, A., Mignet, L., Milo, T.: Active views for electronic commerce. In: Proc. of VLDB (1999)

  5. Abiteboul S., Benjelloun O., Cautis B., Manolescu I., Milo T., Preda N: Lazy query evaluation for active XML. In: Proc. of ACM SIGMOD (2004)

  6. Abiteboul, S., Benjelloun, O., Milo, T.: Positive active XML. In: Proc. of ACM PODS (2004)

  7. Abiteboul, S., Benjelloun, O., Milo, T., Manolescu, I., Weber, R.: Active XML: peer-to-peer data and Web services integration (demo). In: Proc. of VLDB (2002)

  8. Abiteboul, S., Bonifati, A., Cobena, G., Manolescu, I., Milo, T.: Dynamic XML documents with distribution and replication. In: Proc. of ACM SIGMOD (2003)

  9. Abiteboul S., Buneman P., Suciu, D.:Data on the Web: from relations to semistructured data and XML. Morgan Kaufmann, San Francisco (1999)

  10. Abiteboul, S., Cautis, B., Fiat, A., Milo, T.: Digital signatures for modifiable collections. In: ARES, pp. 390–399 (2006)

  11. Abiteboul, S., Hull, R., Vianu, V.: Foundations of Databases. Addison-Wesley, Reading (1995)

  12. Abiteboul, S., Manolescu, I., Preda, N.: Constructing and querying peer-to-peer warehouses of XML resources. Workshop on Semantic Web and Databases (2004)

  13. Abiteboul, S., Manolescu, I., Taropa, E.: A framework for distributed xml data management. In: EDBT, pp. 1049–1058 (2006)

  14. Abiteboul, S., Milo, T., Benjelloun, O.: Regular and unambiguous rewritings for active XML. In: Proc. of ACM PODS (2005)

  15. The active XML homepage. http://activexml.net/

  16. Aguilera V.: The X-OQL homepage. http://www-rocq. inria.fr/~aguilera/xoql

  17. Amann, B., Beeri, C., Fundulaki, I., Scholl, M.: Querying XML sources using an ontology-based mediator. In: Proc. of CoopIS (2002)

  18. The aspect-oriented software development homepage. http://aosd.net/index.php

  19. The Apache Axis soap engine. http://xml.apache. org/axis

  20. Open source active XML. http://forge.objectweb.org/projects/ activexml/

  21. The BitTorrent homepage. http://www.bittorrent.com

  22. Bonifati, A., Braga, D., Campi, A., Ceri, S.: Active XQuery. In: Proc. of ICDE (2002)

  23. Bonifati, A., Ceri, S., Paraboschi, S.: Pushing reactive services to XML repositories using active rules. In: Proc. of the Int. WWW Conf. Hong Kong, China (2001)

  24. Business process execution language for Web services version 1.1. Available from http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/ ws-bpel/

  25. Canaud, E., Benbernou, S., Hacid, M.S.: Managing trust in active XML. In: IEEE International Conference on Service Computing (2004)

  26. Cardelli, L.: Abstractions for mobile computation. In: Secure Internet Programming, pp. 51–94 (1999)

  27. Cardelli, L., Gordon, A.D.: Mobile ambients. In: M. Nivat (ed.) Proc. of FoSSaCS, vol. 1378, pp. 140–155. Springer, Berlin (1998)

  28. Cattell R.G.G.: The Object Database Standard: ODMG-93. Morgan Kaufmann, San Mateo (1994)

  29. Christophides V., Hull R., Kumar A. and Siméon J (2001). Workflow mediation using VorteXML. IEEE Data Eng. Bull. 24(1): 40–45

    Google Scholar 

  30. Cobena, G., Abiteboul, S., Marian, A.: Detecting changes in XML documents. In: Proc. of ICDE (2002)

  31. Macromedia coldfusion MX (2004). http://www.macromedia. com/software/coldfusion/

  32. Cremarenco, C.: Implementation of the active XML peer for the J2ME platform (2003). Internship report, available from http://www.purl.org/net/axml

  33. Damiani, E., di Vimercati, S.D.C., Paraboschi, S., Samarati, P.: Securing XML documents. In: Proc. of EDBT (2001)

  34. Active XML and xyleme. Mmoire CNAM (2005)

  35. RNTL Project E.dot, Content Warehouse open to the Web. http://www-rocq.inria.fr/ amann/edot/

  36. Exist, an open source native XML database. http://www.exist. sourceforge.net/

  37. The FreePastry distributed Hash table. http://www.freepastry. rice.edu

  38. Garcia-Molina H., Papakonstantinou Y., Quass D., Rajaraman A., Sagiv Y., Ullman J. and Widom J. (1997). The TSIMMIS approach to mediation: data models and languages. J. Intell. Inf. Systems 8: 117–132

    Article  Google Scholar 

  39. The Gnutella homepage. http://www.gnutella.com

  40. Goldman, R., Widom, J.: DataGuides: enabling query formulation and optimization in semistructured databases. In: Proc. of VLDB (1997)

  41. Gupta, A.: Integration of Information Systems: Bridging Heterogeneous Databases. IEEE Press (1989)

  42. Gupta, H.: Selection of views to materialize in a data warehouse. In: Proc. of ICDT, pp. 98–112 (1997)

  43. Halevy A.Y., Ives, Z.G., Mork, P., Tatarinov, I.: Piazza: data management infrastructure for semantic web applications. In: Proc. of the Int. WWW Conf. (2003)

  44. Halstead R. (1985). Multilisp: A language for concurrent symbolic computation. ACM Trans. Program. Lang. Systems 7(4): 510–538

    Google Scholar 

  45. Hugh, J.M., Abiteboul, S., Goldman, R., Quass, D., Widom, J.: Lore: A database management system for semistructured data. Tech. rep., Stanford University Database Group (1997)

  46. Hull, R., Benedikt, M., Christophides, V., Su, J.: E-services: a look behind the curtain. In: Proc. of ACM PODS (2003)

  47. Jelly: Executable XML. http://www.jakarta.apache.org/commons/ sandbox/jelly

  48. SUN’s Java Server Pages. http://www.java.sun.com/products/jsp/

  49. JXTA http://www.jxta.org/

  50. The Kazaa Homepage. http://www.kazaa.com

  51. Lahiri, T., Abiteboul, S., Widom, J.: Ozone: integrating structured and semistructured data. In: Proc. Int. Workshop on Database Programming Languages (1999)

  52. Levy, A., Rajaraman, A., Ordille, J.: Querying heterogeneous information sources using source descriptions. In: Proc. of VLDB, pp. 251–262 (1996)

  53. Manolescu, I., Florescu, D., Kossmann, D.: Answering XML queries over heterogeneous data sources. In: Proc. of VLDB (2001)

  54. Microsoft and IBM: The WS-Security specification. http:// www.ibm.com/webservices/library/ws-secure/

  55. Milo, T., Abiteboul, S., Amann, B., Benjelloun, O., Ngoc, F.D.: Exchanging intensional XML data. In: Proc. of ACM SIGMOD (2003)

  56. Molina, H., Ullman, J., Widom, J.: Database Systems: the Complete Book. Prentice Hall (2002)

  57. The Morpheus homepage. http://www.morpheus-os.com

  58. The Mozilla Firefox Browser. http://www.mozilla.com/firefox

  59. Muscholl, A., Schwentick, T., Segoufin, L.: Active context-free games. In: Proc. of STACS (2004)

  60. ObjectWeb, Open Source Middleware. http://www.forge. objectweb.org/

  61. Oracle XML developer’s kit for Java. http://www.otn. oracle.com/tech/xml/

  62. The PHP hypertext preprocessor. http://www.php.net

  63. Powell, J., Maxwell, T.: Integrating office XP smart tags with the Microsoft .NET platform. http://www.msdn.microsoft.com (2001)

  64. RSS 1.0 Specification. http://www.purl.org/rss/1.0

  65. Sahuguet, A., Hull, R., Lieuwen, D., Xiong, M.: Enter once, share everywhere: user profile management in converged networks. In: Proc. of CIDR (2003)

  66. Simple object access protocol (SOAP) 1.1. http://www.w3. org/TR/SOAP

  67. Stonebraker, M., Anderson, E., Hanson, E., Rubenstein, B.: QUEL as a data type. In: Proc. of ACM SIGMOD (1984)

  68. Özsu, T., Valduriez, P.: Principles of Distributed Database Systems, 2nd edn. Prentice-Hall (1999)

  69. Tatarinov, I., Ives, Z., Levy, A., Weld, D.: Updating XML. In: Proc. of ACM SIGMOD (2001)

  70. The Apache Tomcat Servlet Container. http://www.jakarta. apache.org/tomcat

  71. Ullman, J.: Principles of Database and Knowledge Base Systems. Computer Science Press (1989)

  72. Vieille, L.: Recursive axioms in deductive databases: the query/subquery approach. In: Kerschberg, L. (ed.) Proc. First Intl. Conf. on Expert Database Systems, pp. 179–193 (1986)

  73. Weikum, G. (ed.): Special Issue: Infrastructure for Advanced E-Services, 24(1) (2001)

  74. Widom, J., Ceri, S.: Active Database Systems: Triggers and Rules for Advanced Database Processing. Morgan Kaufmann (1996)

  75. Wiederhold, G.: Intelligent integration of information. In: Proc. of ACM SIGMOD, pp. 434–437. Washington, DC (1993)

  76. Web services definition language (WSDL). http://www.w3.org/ TR/wsdl

  77. Web services flow language (WSFL 1.0). Available from http:// www.ibm.com/

  78. XLANG, Web services for business process design. http://www. gotdotnet.com/team/xml_wsspecs/ xlang-c

  79. The extensible markup language (XML) 1.0, 2nd Edn. http://www. w3.org/TR/REC-xml

  80. The XML schema specification. http://www.w3.org/TR/XML/ Schema

  81. XQuery 1.0: an XML query language. http://www.w3.org/ TR/xquery

  82. XSL transformations (XSLT) Version 1.0. http://www.w3. org/TR/xslt

  83. Xyleme home page. http://www.xyleme.com

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. INRIA-Futurs & LRI, Paris Sud, France

    Serge Abiteboul

  2. Google Inc., Mountain View, CA, USA

    Omar Benjelloun

  3. Tel-Aviv University, Tel-Aviv, Israel

    Tova Milo

Authors
  1. Serge Abiteboul
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Omar Benjelloun
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Tova Milo
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Omar Benjelloun.

Additional information

The first and third authors were partially funded by the European Project Edos. Work done when the second and third authors were at INRIA.

Work done when the second and third authors were at INRIA.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Abiteboul, S., Benjelloun, O. & Milo, T. The Active XML project: an overview. The VLDB Journal 17, 1019–1040 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00778-007-0049-y

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Revised:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00778-007-0049-y

Keywords