Capturing and Querying Multiple Aspects of Semistructured Data

Curtis E. Dyreson
Department of Computer Science
James Cook University, Australia
curtis@cs.jcu.edu.au - Michael H. Böhlen Christian S. Jensen
Department of Computer Science
Aalborg University, Denmark
{boehlen,csj}@cs.auc.dk

Abstract:

Motivated to a large extent by the substantial and growing prominence of the World-Wide Web and the potential benefits that may be obtained by applying database concepts and techniques to web data management, new data models and query languages have emerged that contend with web data. These models organize data in graphs where nodes denote objects or values and edges are labeled with single words or phrases. Nodes are described by the labels of the paths that lead to them, and these descriptions serve as the basis for querying.

This paper proposes an extensible framework for capturing and querying meta-data properties in a semistructured data model. Properties such as temporal aspects of data, prices associated with data access, quality ratings associated with the data, and access restrictions on the data are considered. Specifically, the paper defines an extensible data model and an accompanying query language that provides new facilities for matching, slicing, collapsing, and coalescing properties. It also briefly introduces an implemented, SQL-like query language for the extended data model that includes additional constructs for the effective querying of graphs with properties.