XML Data Management 2012/13

Slides

The slides of the course are in PDF and cover the following topics:

• Overview  (Slides)

1. Usage and Roles of XML  (Slides)
   

   The following documents contain the examples mentioned on the slides:

   • books.html, books.xml, books.xsl
   • HelloWorld.odt, HelloWorld.docx
   • helloWorld.svg
   • trekking.gpx
2. XML Syntax  (Slides)
3. Document Type Descriptions  (Slides)

An example file referencing two DTDs: mathmlInXHTML.xml

4. Document Object Model  (Slides)

   Example program in Java that traverses a DOM tree (adapted from Chris Mair)

5. XPath - Overview  (Slides)
6. XPath 1.0 Principles  (Slides)

The following documents contain the examples mentioned on the slides:

• recipes.xml, recipes.dtd
• family.xml, family.dtd
7. XSLT  (Slides)
8. XQuery  (Slides)
9. XML Schema  (Slides)
10. Deterministic Schemas and DTDs  (Slides)
11. Core XPath  (Slides)

Exercises

1. XML Syntax and DTDs

One of the exercises is to write DTDs for the document recipes-elem.xml and recipes.xml.

2. Document Navigation with the Java DOM Interface and with XPath (Sample solutions XPath)

   As a starting point for the DOM exercises, you can use the DOMTest.java example.
   A good text case is the recipes.xml dataset.
   You can see from the DocPrinter.java code how to output XML using the Transformer factory.

For the XPath exercises, you need the file countries.xml.

3. XPath with Identities and First Steps with XSLT (Sample solutions XPath and XSLT)

For the XPath exercises, you need the file courses-ID.xml.

4. XSLT Stylesheets (Sample solutions XSLT)

For these exercises, you need the files countries.xml, and countries.dtd.

5. XQuery (Sample solutions XQuery)

For these exercises, you need the files countries.xml, and countries.dtd.

6. XML Schema

For these exercises, you need the files juicers.dtd, juicers.xml, juicers5.xml, juicers6.xml, juicers7.xml, juicers0.xml, juicers0.xsd, juicers8.xml, and juicers9.xml,

Coursework

1. XPath Queries over Recipes (Sample Solutions, Discussion)

   Your queries should run over documents satisfying the DTD recipes.dtd, like for instance recipes.xml.
   Submit your solutions in the file recipe-queries.txt.

2. Quick and Dirty XML Diff

   The following papers may help you to build up your intuition:

   • Adrian Mouat: XML Diff and Patch Utilities. BSc Thesis, Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, 2002.
   • Gregory Cobena, Serge Abiteboul, Amelie Marian: Detecting Changes in XML Documents.
     International Conference on Data Engineering, ICDE 2002: 41-52
   • Yuan Wang, David J. DeWitt, Jin-yi Cai: X-Diff: An Effective Change Detection Algorithm for XML Documents.
     International Conference on Data Engineering, ICDE 2003: 519-530

   You may get further inspiration from the website of DeltaXML Ltd.

3. XSLT Transformations over Movies (Sample Solutions, Discussion)

   Your queries should run over documents satisfying the DTD movies.dtd, movies.xml.
   Submit your solutions in the file movie-transformations.txt.

4. XQuery Queries over Movies (Sample Solutions)

   Your queries should run over documents satisfying the DTD movies.dtd, movies.xml.
   Submit your solutions in the file movie-queries.txt.

Exam

To give you an idea what you will be asked to do in an exam, have a look at the exam of 13 September 2012.
The questions of the exam referred to the three XML files mondial-small.xml, mondial-small.xsd, mondial.xml, and to the text file answers.txt.

The exam of 22 February is now marked.