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Almost all enterprises use relational databases to handle real time business operations and most need to generate various XML documents for data exchanges internally among various departments and externally with business partners. Exporting data in a relational database to an XML document can be considered a data conversion process. Based on the four approaches for data conversion: Customized program, Interpretive transformer, Translator generator, and Logical level translation, this paper proposes a new interpretive approach using Structured Export Markup Language (SEML) interpreter for converting relational data into XML documents. The frameworks and languages proposed by other researchers are neither generic nor able to generate arbitrary XML documents. Therefore, SEML interpreter is a simple, user friendly, and complete solution with a new mark-up language ? SEML ? for data conversion. The solution can be used as a generic tool for extracting, transforming, and loading (ETL) purposes. In other words, the SEML interpreter is a solution for relational databases similar to what X-Query is for XML databases.

The extensible markup language (XML) has become a standard for persistent storage and data interchange via the Internet due to its openness, self-descriptiveness, and flexibility. This article proposes a systematic approach to reverse engineer arbitrary XML documents to their conceptual schema, extended DTD graphs, which are DTD graphs with data semantics. The proposed approach not only determines the structure of the XML document, but also derives candidate data semantics from the XML element instances by treating each XML element instance as a record in a table of a relational database. One application of the determined data semantics is to verify the linkages among elements. Implicit and explicit referential linkages are among XML elements modeled by the parent-children structure and ID/IDREF(S), respectively. As a result, an arbitrary XML document can be reverse engineered into its conceptual schema in an extended DTD graph format.

The need for interoperation and data exchange through the Internet makes XML a dominant standard language. Much work has been done on translating relational data into XML documents and vice versa. However, there is not an integrated method to combine them together as one technology for mass information transmission on the Internet. Furthermore, most XML-enabled database management systems can only translate a few relations into an XML document without data semantics constraints consideration, which is not sufficient for information highway on the Web. This paper presents a methodology, XTOPO, to transmit a relational database on the Internet using XML document as medium. XTOPO facilitates the translation from relational database to XML document and vice versa. XTOPO divides an XML document hierarchical structure into four different topologies—single sub-element (element, sub-element), multiple sub-elements (element, multiple sub-elements), group (element, group of sub-elements), and referral element (element, element—and captures their semantics into classification tables as a knowledge-based repository. The view of a sender company’s information in a relational database is mapped into four topological XML documents according to their data semantics constraints. The intermediate XML documents are integrated into an XML document using DOM (Document Object Model). The XML document instances are loaded into a relational database with generated Object Identity as key. The receiver company translates the XML document back to relational database for processing. The result is a mechanism of mass information transmission on the Internet for an information highway.

A practitioner’s approach to integrate databases and evolve them so as to support new database applications is presented. The approach consists of a joint bottom-up and top-down methodology; the bottom-up approach is taken to integrate existing database using standard schema integration techniques (B-Schema), the top-down approach is used to develop a database schema for the new applications (T-Schema). The T-Schema uses a joint functional-data analysis. The B-schema is evolved by comparing it with the generated T-schema. This facilitates an evolutionary approach to integrate existing databases to support new applications as and when needed. The mutual completeness check of the T-Schema against B-Schema derive the schema modification steps to be performed on B-Schema to meet the requirements of the new database applications. A case study is presented to illustrate the methodology.

The WWW and its associated distributed information services provide rich world-wide online information services, where objects are linked together to facilitate interactive access. Users seeking information from the Internet traverse from one object via links to another. It is important to analyze user access patterns, which helps improve web page design by providing an efficient access between highly correlated objects, and also assists in better marketing decisions by placing advertisements in frequently visited documents. We need to study the user surfing behavior through examining the web access log, browsing frequency of web pages and computing the average duration of visitors. This chapter offers an architecture to store the derived web user access paths in a data warehouse, and facilitates its view maintainability by use of metadata. The system will update the user access paths pattern with the data warehouse by the data operation functions in the metadata. Whenever a new user access path occurs, the view maintainability is triggered by a constraint class in the metadata. The data warehouse can be analyzed on the frequent pattern tree of user access paths on the web site within a period and duration. The result is an online analytical mining path traversal pattern. Performance studies have been done to demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the system with the following contributions: an architecture of online analytical mining using frame model metadata, a methodology of implementing the online analytical mining, and the resultant cluster of web pages frequently visited by users for marketing use.

Extensible Markup Language (XML) has become a standard for persistent storage and data interchange via the Internet due to its openness, self-descriptiveness and flexibility. This chapter proposes a systematic approach to reverse engineer arbitrary XML documents to their conceptual schema – Extended DTD Graphs ? which is a DTD Graph with data semantics. The proposed approach not only determines the structure of the XML document, but also derives candidate data semantics from the XML element instances by treating each XML element instance as a record in a table of a relational database. One application of the determined data semantics is to verify the linkages among elements. Implicit and explicit referential linkages are among XML elements modeled by the parent-children structure and ID/IDREF(S) respectively. As a result, an arbitrary XML document can be reverse engineered into its conceptual schema in an Extended DTD Graph format.

Due to heavy workload and tight working schedule, it is difficult for part-time students at City University of Hong Kong to ‘digest’ course materials and to understand the content of the course. Therefore, it will be convenient if a lecture presentation with course materials is recorded and posted into the Internet. Then, students can easily attend the lecture on-line in anywhere or watch back the video archive of the presentation through the Web. This chapter aims to provide a solution to achieve a hybrid learning model (HLM) including e-learning and traditional teaching platform by synchronizing video, audio and image files which are used in a presentation. In addition, this is targeted to record and to retrieve by using an on-line podcasting system and an XML SMIL technology respectively.

The extensible markup language (XML) has become a standard for persistent storage and data interchange via the Internet due to its openness, self-descriptiveness, and flexibility. This article proposes a systematic approach to reverse engineer arbitrary XML documents to their conceptual schema, extended DTD graphs, which are DTD graphs with data semantics. The proposed approach not only determines the structure of the XML document, but also derives candidate data semantics from the XML element instances by treating each XML element instance as a record in a table of a relational database. One application of the determined data semantics is to verify the linkages among elements. Implicit and explicit referential linkages are among XML elements modeled by the parent-children structure and ID/IDREF(S), respectively. As a result, an arbitrary XML document can be reverse engineered into its conceptual schema in an extended DTD graph format.

A practitioner’s approach to integrate databases and evolve them so as to support new database applications is presented. The approach consists of a joint bottom-up and top-down methodology; the bottom-up approach is taken to integrate existing database using standard schema integration techniques (B-Schema), the top-down approach is used to develop a database schema for the new applications (T-Schema). The T-Schema uses a joint functional-data analysis. The B-schema is evolved by comparing it with the generated T-schema. This facilitates an evolutionary approach to integrate existing databases to support new applications as and when needed. The mutual completeness check of the T-Schema against B-Schema derive the schema modification steps to be performed on B-Schema to meet the requirements of the new database applications. A case study is presented to illustrate the methodology.