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International Conference on Deductive and Object-Oriented Databases

DOOD 1995: Deductive and Object-Oriented Databases pp 319–344Cite as

Querying semistructured heterogeneous information

  • Query Processing II
  • Conference paper
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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 1013))

Abstract

Semistructured data has no absolute schema fixed in advance and its structure may be irregular or incomplete. Such data commonly arises in sources that do not impose a rigid structure (such as the World-Wide Web) and when data is combined from several heterogeneous sources. Data models and query languages designed for well structured data are inappropriate in such environments. Starting with a “lightweight” object model adopted for the TSIMMIS project at Stanford, in this paper we describe a query language and object repository designed specifically for semistructured data. Our language provides meaningful query results in cases where conventional models and languages do not: when some data is absent, when data does not have regular structure, when similar concepts are represented using different types, when heterogeneous sets are present, and when object structure is not fully known. This paper motivates the key concepts behind our approach, describes the language through a series of examples (a complete semantics is available in an accompanying technical report [QRS+94]), and describes the basic architecture and query processing strategy of the “lightweight” object repository we have developed.

This work was supported by ARPA Contract F33615-93-1-1339, by the Anderson Faculty Scholar Fund, and by equipment grants from Digital Equipment Corporation and IBM Corporation.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Stanford University, USA

    Dallan Quass, Anand Rajaraman, Jeffrey Ullman & Jennifer Widom

  2. Hebrew University, Israel

    Yehoshua Sagiv

Authors
  1. Dallan Quass
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  2. Anand Rajaraman
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  3. Yehoshua Sagiv
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  4. Jeffrey Ullman
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  5. Jennifer Widom
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Editor information

Tok Wang Ling Alberto O. Mendelzon Laurent Vieille

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© 1995 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Quass, D., Rajaraman, A., Sagiv, Y., Ullman, J., Widom, J. (1995). Querying semistructured heterogeneous information. In: Ling, T.W., Mendelzon, A.O., Vieille, L. (eds) Deductive and Object-Oriented Databases. DOOD 1995. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1013. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-60608-4_48

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-60608-4_48

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-60608-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-48460-8

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