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The Active XML project: an overview

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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.

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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

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  1. Serge Abiteboul
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  2. Omar Benjelloun
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  3. Tova Milo
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Correspondence to Omar Benjelloun.

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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.

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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

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