COLLOQUIUM
             Computer Science Department, Boston University

Speaker: Yi Chen
         University of Pennsylvania

Date:  Friday, April 1
Time:  9:00
Place: Room MCS 135, 111 Cummington Street 
       (for directions, see www.cs.bu.edu/colloquium)

Title: Managing XML Data Effectively in Relational Databases

Abstract:

 XML has become a standard data representation format in various
 applications, from bioinformatics, healthcare and astronomy, to finance,
 legislative documents and government data. With the large amount of data
 now being represented in XML, the question is raised of how to effectively
 store, index, and access it to retrieve information. Since relational
 databases have matured through more than 30 years of development, it is
 natural to investigate whether this technology can be leveraged to manage
 XML data.

 In this talk, I present techniques for storing and querying XML data using
 relational databases in different scenarios. When the schema of XML data
 is not available, a generic storage mapping to relational databases is
 proposed. Based on a novel bi-labeling scheme, an XML query is translated
 to an SQL query. Compared with previous work, the generated SQL query
 contains fewer joins and requires fewer disk accesses to execute. When a
 schema is available, structural and semantic constraint information of an
 XML document is used to guide the mapping design. In contrast with
 previous work that only considers structural information, the proposed
 mapping reduces the redundancy of the XML data in its relational storage
 and enables efficient validation of data correctness with respect to
 constraints.

Biography:

 Yi Chen is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Computer and Information
 Science at the University of Pennsylvania. She received her M.S. in
 Computer and Information Science from the University of Pennsylvania in
 2000 and her B.S. in Computer Science from Central South University, China
 in 1999. Her research interests include database systems, web data and
 scientific data management, query processing and optimization techniques
 for databases and streams.

Host: George Kollios