CS290S: Management of XML and (Semi)structured Data

Instructor: Wang-Chiew Tan
Email: wctan@cs.ucsc.edu
When: MW 5-6.45pm
Where: Stevenson 221
Office: BE359A
Office hours: By appointment only.

[ Course Description ] [ Grading Scheme ] [ Textbooks ] [ Syllabus ] [ Project ]

Course Description:

The widespread use of XML data and the Web has brought about new demands on traditional database engines. Traditional database engines, backed by more than 20 years of research and engineering, are well-known for their efficiency in managing large volumes of relational data (i.e., data that occurs in rigid table-like structures). Their ability, however, to efficiently manage XML data, which may not conform to a table structure, is still very much at the infancy. In this course, we shall study various technical issues that arise in the management of relational and XML data. This course covers the technical issues through selected papers on various themes: Data integration, XML publishing and storage systems, XML toolkit, XML Schema and queries, Data Exchange and Peer-to-Peer systems, fundamentals of relational query evaluation, and normalization of XML documents. It is also likely that there will be one or two guest lecturers for this course.

Grading Scheme:

Class participation: 10%
Paper presentations: 30%
Reviews: 30%
Project: 30%

Students are expected to participate actively in class and in the newsgroup/mailing list.
Presentations: In the entire course, each student shall present a paper in class.
Paper Reviews: 5 paper reviews, different from those you are designated to present, are expected. You are free to write more reviews. Only the best 5 reviews will count towards the grade.
Project: Students are also expected to complete a project. See Project for details.

Textbooks:

There will be no textbooks for this class though you can refer to the list of books below for additional reading, in addition to your usual database course textbooks.

Data on the Web. Morgan Kaufmann. S. Abiteboul and P. Buneman and D. Suciu
Foundations of Databases. Addison Wesley. S. Abiteboul and R. Hull and V. Vianu

Prerequisites: By interview only. Please see the instructor. Note that CMPS221 is not a prerequisite for this course.

Tentative Syllabus:

History, various concepts (Object Exchange Model, UnQL, XML Data Model, some language flavors in these data models) (1-2 lectures)

Apr 2, Apr 7, Apr 9

[ pdf ] A Web Odyssey - From Codd to XML - by Vianu (PODS'01)

Apr 14

[ pdf ] Object Fusion in Mediator Systems - by Papakonstantinou, Abiteboul, Garcia-Molina (VLDB'96)

Apr 16

[ pdf ] A Data Transformation System for Biological Data Sources - by Buneman, Davidson, Hart, Overton, Wong (VLDB'95)

Apr 21 [Leon]

[ ps ] SilkRoute: Trading Between Relations and XML - by Fernandez, Suciu, Tan (WWW9)

Apr 23

[ pdf ] Efficiently Publishing Relational Data as XML Documents - by Shanmugasundaram, Shekita, Barr, Carey, Lindsay, Pirahesh, Reinwald (VLDB '00)

Apr 28 [Yue]

[ ps ] Storing Semistructured Data with STORED - by Deutsch, Fernandez, Suciu, (SIGMOD '99)

Apr 30

[ pdf ] Storing and Querying XML Data Using an RDBMS - by Florescu, Kossman (IEEE Data Engineering Bulletin '99)

May 5 [Deepavali]

[ pdf ] Information Integration using Logical Views - by Ullman (ICDT'97)

[ ps ] Answering Queries Using Views: A Survey - by Halevy (VLDB Journal '01)

May 7 [Suruchi]

[ ps ] Processing XML Streams with Deterministic Automata - by Green, Miklau, Onizuka, Suciu (ICDT '03)

May 12 [Thomas]

May 16 - CS Seminar. "Query Processing over Data Streams" [abstract]

Mike Franklin, UC Berkeley

[ pdf ] XMLTK: An XML Toolkit for Scalable Stream Processing - by Avilla-Campillo, Green, Gupta, Onizuka, Raven, Suciu (PlanX '02)

May 19 [Guozheng]

[ pdf ] Translating Web Data - by Popa, Velegrakis, Miller, Hernandez, Fagin (VLDB'02)

May 21 [Lucian Popa, IBM Almaden]

[ pdf ] A Normal Form for XML Documents - by Arenas, Libkin (PODS'02)

May 28 [Xinyu]

[ pdf ] An Information-Theoretic Approach to Normal Forms for Relational and XML Data - by Arenas, Libkin (PODS'03)

Jun 2 [Enes]

[ ps ] WOL: A Language for Database Transformation and Constraints - by Davidson, Kosky (ICDE'97)

Jun 4 [Chris]

Project

The project for the course can be one of the following options:

A detailed study of a database problem:

You are expected to conduct a detailed study of a few existing papers. Deliverable: a report of length about 15 pages. This report should describe the problem that you are studying, provide details of existing solution(s), and a critical analysis of the solutions.

An implementation and/or experimental analysis of some proposed techniques in existing literature:

Deliverables: You are expected to be able to demo your implementation to the instructor and provide experimental analysis on the performance of your implemenation, if necessary. A 5-page report on your implementation is also expected.

It can be a novel solution to some existing database problem:

Deliverables: Please discuss this with the instructor.

Please see the instructor for some project suggestions. You are also free to propose your own project but you should discuss your project proposal with the instructor first.