Tutorials at iiWAS 2007

XML Databases: Trends, Issues, and Future Research

J. WENNY RAHAYU, ERIC PARDEDE
Department of Computer Science & Computer Engineering
La Trobe University
Bundoora, VIC 3086, Australia
Phone: +61 3 9479 1282
Fax: +61 3 9479 3060
Email: {W.Rahayu, E.Pardede}@latrobe.edu.au

DAVID TANIAR
Clayton School of Information Technology
Monash University
Clayton, VIC 3800, Australia
Phone: +61 3 9905 9693
Fax: +61 3 9905 5159
Email: David.Taniar@infotech.monash.edu.au

Abstract

It is growingly popular to use XML documents for exchanging information between different types of applications, as well as for representing semi-structured data. With the increase usage of XML structures, and the growing size of XML document collections, it is now critical to utilise efficient techniques to store and retrieve XML documents.

Storing XML documents in a database system has currently been supported by various commercial database management repositories, including XML-Enabled DBMS which is based on a relational engine extended with XML types, and XML-Native DBMS. XML document is complex in nature due to the many ad-hoc ways to represent the data. Subsequently this leads to the need to address XML-specific issues in database design which inherently different from those of relational data. Querying and updating XML data also raise complex issues, due to the hierarchical tree structure of XML data.

The XML databases form a foundation for the development of XML-based applications for data analysis, knowledge extraction, and business intelligence systems. In this talk we will cover the concept of XML Warehousing and how it differs from the traditional relational data warehousing. Security is an important issue is any database system, and the hierarchical nature of XML data has stimulated the need for a new XML security scheme that is not simply based on record or row level of access scheme. Moreover, the applications of XML Warehousing in specific domains such as Clinical warehousing in medical domain has also introduced the need to maintain privacy and user access scheme.

A number of specific issues in XML Databases will be discussed in this tutorial, including:

• XML Database Design
• XML Database Implementation in XML-Enabled and XML-Native DBMSs
• XML Query, XML Update, XML Trigger
• XML Versioning
• XML Warehousing
• XML Security

Brief biography of the presenters

J. Wenny Rahayu is an Associate Professor at the Department of Computer Science and Computer Engineering LaTrobe University. Her PhD thesis in the area of Object-Relational Databases has been awarded the Best PhD Thesis 2001 by the Computer Science Association Australia. She has been lecturing at the Department of Computer Science and Computer Engineering La Trobe University since 1995. In 2003, she was awarded the Dean's Award for excellence in teaching. Her research areas cover a wide range of advanced databases topics including Object-Relational Databases, Distributed and Parallel Databases, Web Databases, Bioinformatics Databases, Semantic Web and Ontology, Semantic Grid in Grid Computing, XML Databases and Data Warehousing. She is currently the Head of Data Engineering and Knowledge Management Laboratory at La Trobe University. To date, she has successfully supervised to completion 5 PhD and more than 10 Masters/Honours level students. She publishes extensively every year, including four books (one authored and three edited), and more than 80 research papers in international journals and proceedings. She has been invited for numerous talks in her research areas, and has been appointed as member of journal editorial board and invited to serve as publicity chair, program-co-chair, and program committee member in several international journals and conferences in the area of databases and web applications.

Eric Pardede is an Associate Lecturer at La Trobe University, Melbourne. He completed his Doctor of Philosophy in Computer Science at La Trobe University under the supervision of Dr. Wenny Rahayu and Dr. David Taniar. From the same university he received his Master of Information Technology in 2002. He also holds a Master of Quality Management degrees from University of Wollongong and a Bachelor of Engineering degree from Bandung Institute of Technology. He has published a book and several research papers appeared in international journals and conference proceedings. He is an active scholar that has chairing several international conferences and workshops. His current research area is in XML Database, Data Modeling and Query Optimization.

David Taniar holds Bachelors (Honours), Masters, and PhD degrees - all in Computer Science/Information Technology, with a particular speciality in Databases. He publishes extensively every year. He is currently a Senior Lecturer at the Faculty of Information Technology, Monash University, Australia. He first joined Monash University in 1997 as a lecturer in the Gippsland School of Computing and Information Technology. After a short stay at the Department of Computer Science, RMIT University in 1999-2000, he joined the School of Business Systems at Clayton in the beginning of 2001 as a Senior Lecturer. He is a founding editor-in-chief of a number of international journals, including Intl J of Data Warehousing and Mining, Intl J of Business Intelligence and Data Mining, Mobile Information Systems, Journal of Mobile Multimedia, Intl J of Web Information Systems, and Intl J of Web and Grid Services. He is also an editorial board member of numerous international journals.