Transforming the Web into a database with XML

Abstract

The World Wide Web is considered by far to be a simple and universal standard for exchanging information. This information that started to be manually composed and human readable, needed to grow more to reach dynamic composition and machine readability. Static web documents starved for a light breeze to release it from data and presentation mixture and lift it to a higher level of data representation and organization. XML "the extensible markup language'' as a standard of data representation on the web offered flexibility and simplicity in representing self describing electronic documents. This thesis presents an introduction to XML technology and its hierarchical structure. Then it explains the diverse ideas to describe and manipulate XML data starting with Schemas and DTDs and then describing different query languages designed for semi- structured data and XML. It argues then on the best approach between Semi-structured new techniques and the possibility to leverage relational technology providing query capabilities for XML documents. Then it offers an idea to integrate existing relational databases in the web. Then it deals with how to represent the relations as XML documents upon request and how to manipulate data either server or client side. Finally, the thesis presents an XML developed example where existing relations are represented as XML documents, manipulated and queried accordingly.