An important application of XML is the interchange of electronic data (EDI) between multiple data sources on the Web. As XML data proliferates on the Web, applications will need to integrate and aggregate data from multiple source and clean and transform data to facilitate exchange. Data extraction, conversion, transformation, and integration are all well-understood database problems, and their solutions rely on a query language. We present a query language for XML, called XML-QL, which we argue is suitable for performing the above tasks. XML-QL is a declarative, "relational complete" query language and is simple enough that it can be optimized. XML-QL can extract data from existing XML documents and construct new XML documents. Keywords: XML, query languages, electronic-data interchange (EDI) 1. Introduction The goal of XML is to provide many of SGML's benefits not available in HTML and to provide them in a language that is easier to learn and use than complete SGML. These benefits...

Similar to most scientic studies, biological analyses demand a great deal of computations and simulations involving sophisticated tools that are often found geographically distributed over the Internet. A worldwide eort in genomics research has resulted in a powerful collection of publicly available sequence analysis tools. These tools often require specialized local services and domain knowledge to function correctly, rendering them unlikely candidates for integration into remote database applications. Thus, integration of heterogeneous \functions" still remains an open problem. Providing a reasonable framework for seamless integration of these tools with database query engines will enable application developers to exploit and harness the power of these eective analysis tools. In this paper, we present an integration framework for such tools by enabling access to them in a user transparent way as part of database queries. In our system, such online tools are abstracted as remote user dened functions (RUDF). An extended SQL DDL language, called the Internet Function Denition Language (IFDL), is presented for the specication and denition of RUDFs. The interface between database system and the Internet is implemented using a layer based on a language called the Hyper Text Query Language (HTQL). The separation of IFDL, DDL, HTQL and SQL DML oers several optimization opportunities and makes it possible to develop an architecture for interoperability of heterogeneous databases with RUDFs in more simple and ecient ways. 1

Abstract Creating a web site for variant devices is an important work in ubiquitous computing. This paper, based on ontology and semantic web, proposed a device adaptive web site model, named WebUnify. WebUnify is composed of three parts---WWW Server, Content Server and Web Site Creation. With CC/PP protocol, WWW Server can recognize different kinds of device profiles and generate variant requests to Content Server, and then, the returned content, which is expressed as XML, is transferred into the device adaptive format document by XSLT with the device’s XSL description. During the course above, Content Server generates adaptive content according to WSDA algorithm and web site ontology. At mean time, WebUnify platform provides a ontology-based web site authoring tools by improving Protégé tools. At last, a practical web site is built on WebUnify.

Semi-structured data, including but not limited to structured documents, has speci#c characteristics and is used in ways di#erent to tabular data. SGML and XML are widely used to represent information of this type. The demands on systems that manage semi-structured data vary from those on traditional relational systems. This paper reviews the nature and characteristics of semi-structured data, and the functional needs of those applications, including query requirements, document description, manipulation, and document management needs. It examines alternative physical models for semi-structured data, and evaluates and compares alternative system architectures.