Skip to main content

Equal time for data on the internet with websemantics

  • Conference paper
  • First Online:

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 1377))

Abstract

Many collections of scientific data in particular disciplines are available today around the world. Much of this data conforms to some agreed upon standard for data exchange, i.e., a standard schema and its semantics. However, sharing this data among a global community of users is still difficult because of a lack of standards for the following necessary functions: (i) data providers need a standard for describing or publishing available sources of data; (ii) data administrators need a standard for discovering the published data and (iii) users need a standard for accessing this discovered data. This paper describes a prototype implementation of a system, WebSemantics, that accomplishes the above tasks. We describe an architecture and protocols for the publication, discovery and access to scientific data. We define a language for discovering sources and querying the data in these sources, and we provide a formal semantics for this language.

This research was partially sponsored by the National Science Foundation grant IRI9630102 and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency grant 01-5-28838

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.

Preview

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

References

  1. S. Adali, K. S. Candan, Y. Papakonstantinou, and V. S. Subrahmaniam. Query caching and optimization in distributed mediator systems. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGMOD'96, pages 137–148, 1996.

    Google Scholar 

  2. C. Bowman et al. The Harvest information discovery and access system. Computer Networks and ISDN Systems, 28:119–125, 1995.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  3. R.G.G. Cattell et al. The Object Database Standard — ODMG 93, Release 1.2. Morgan Kaufmann, 1996.

    Google Scholar 

  4. Michael J. Franklin, editor. SIGMOD Record, volume 26, March 1997. Special Section on Environmental Information Systems.

    Google Scholar 

  5. G. Gardarin et al. IRO-DB: A distributed system federating object and relational databases. In O.A. Bukhres and A.K. Elmagarmid, editors, Object-Oriented Multidatabase Systems: A solution for Advanced Applications. Prentice Hall, 1996.

    Google Scholar 

  6. H. Garcia-Molina et al. Integrating and accessing heterogeneous information sources in TSIMMIS. In Proceedings of the AAAI Symposium on Information Gathering, pages 61–64, Stanford, California, March 1995.

    Google Scholar 

  7. L. M. Haas, D. Kossmann, E. L. Wimmers, and J. Yang. Optimizing queries across diverse data sources. In Proceedings of VLDB'97, pages 276–285, 1997.

    Google Scholar 

  8. T. Kirk, A. Y. Levy, Y. Sagiv, and D. Srivastava. The Information Manifold. In Proc. of the AAAI Spring Symposium on Information Gathering in Distributed Heterogeneous Environments, Stanford, CA, March 1995.

    Google Scholar 

  9. D. Konopnicki and O. Shmueli. W3QS: A query system for the World Wide Web. In Proceedings of VLDB'95, pages 54–65, 1995.

    Google Scholar 

  10. Meta Content Framework using XML. http://www.w3.org/TR/N0TE-MCF-XML.

    Google Scholar 

  11. A. O. Mendelzon, G. A. Mihaila, and T. Milo. Querying the World Wide Web. In Proceedings of PDIS'96, pages 80–91, 1996.

    Google Scholar 

  12. G. A. Mihaila, L. Raschid, and A. Tomasic. Equal Time for Data on the Internet with WebSemantics. Technical report, University of Toronto, 1997. http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~georgem/ws/ws.ps.

    Google Scholar 

  13. Y. Papakonstantinou et al. Capabilities-based query rewriting in mediator systems. In Proceedings of PDIS'96, 1996.

    Google Scholar 

  14. M. Rusinkiewicz et al. Query processing in a heterogeneous multidatabase environment. In Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Parallel and Distributed Processing, 1989.

    Google Scholar 

  15. Resource Description Framework (RDF). http://www.w3.org/RDF/.

    Google Scholar 

  16. Secrétariat dádministration National des Données Relatives à l'Eau. Sandre, Rue Edouard Chamberland, 87065 Limoges, France, 1995.

    Google Scholar 

  17. A. Tomasic, L. Raschid, and P. Valduriez. Scaling heterogeneous databases and the design of DISCO. In Proceeding of ICDCS'96, 1996.

    Google Scholar 

  18. V. Vassalos and Y. Papakonstantinou. Describing and using query capabilities of heterogeneous sources. In Proc. of VLDB'97, pages 256–265, 1997.

    Google Scholar 

  19. G. Wiederhold. Mediators in the architecture of future information systems. Computer, 25(3):38–49, March 1992.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  20. Extensible Markup Language (XML). http://www.w3.org/XML.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Editor information

Hans-Jörg Schek Gustavo Alonso Felix Saltor Isidro Ramos

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 1998 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

About this paper

Cite this paper

Mihaila, G.A., Raschid, L., Tomasic, A. (1998). Equal time for data on the internet with websemantics. In: Schek, HJ., Alonso, G., Saltor, F., Ramos, I. (eds) Advances in Database Technology — EDBT'98. EDBT 1998. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1377. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg . https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0100979

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0100979

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-64264-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-69709-1

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

Publish with us

Policies and ethics