Paper Info
Title
A Workbench for Prototyping XML Data Exchange
Abstract
This paper describes a prototype software which is the outcome of a research carried at the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice in the framework of the project Data-X1. The software is a workbench for “data engineers”, integrating several tools which assist the user in all the tasks of integration and exchange of data with a standard format, for instance for application integration, generation of content-rich web portals, building of virtual information systems, etc. The system described here is a first step towards the construction of a “data hub”: with this term, we intend a comprehensive tool which, like a network hub device, connects several information sources and consumers through standard ports, allowing the designer to dynamically interconnect these ports in different ways, and performing appropriate translations. Such a tool would be of great help for the tasks above mentioned, and its existence is made possible by the nowadays wide acceptance of XML. Data exchange on the WWW has received a lot of attention due to the rapid diffusion of the proposal of XML as standard for information description by the W3 Consortium. The complete flexibility and generality of the XML markup mechanism as well as its platform-independence, allows its use in many contexts as a language for describing data of any kind, not only for documents to be published on WWW. What is missing is either a tool or a linguistic level to denote the meaning and type of data, since the XML markup mechanism only denotes the logic structure of data. Currently, XML allows neither description of the semantics nor that of the internal representation of data, with respect to applications. The DTD (Document Type Declaration) is of little help to address semantics issues, because it only describes the structural scheme of the document parts composition. The internal representation of data cannot be used since XML is text-based and platform independent, therefore data should be translated in a standard alphanumeric coding by other means. When exchanging data between different data sources, or between data sources and applications by using an XML based mechanism, this omission may limit the possibility of verifying data coherency. This involves both the formalization aspects (type) and the semantics aspects (meaning). This problem is a big roadblock in many application areas.
Year
Venue
Keywords
2002
SEBD
data exchange
Field
DocType
Citations 
Information system,Document type declaration,Data hub,Data exchange,Programming language,Software engineering,XML,Computer science,Software,Semantics,Markup language
Conference
1
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.36
4
2
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Renzo Orsini1370166.17
Augusto Celentano236957.55