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XML has spread beyond the computer science fields and reached other areas such as, e‐commerce, identification, information storage, instant messaging and others. Data communicated over these domains are now mainly based on XML. Thus, allowing non‐expert programmers to manipulate and control their XML data is essential. The purpose of this paper is to present an XA2C framework intended for both non‐expert and expert programmers and provide them with means to write/draw their XML data manipulation operations.

In the literature, this issue has been dealt with from two perspectives: first, XML alteration/adaptation techniques requiring a certain level of expertise to be implemented and are not unified yet; and second, Mashups, which are not formally defined yet and are not specific to XML data, and XML‐oriented visual languages are based on structural transformations and data extraction mainly and do not allow XML textual data manipulations. The paper discusses existing approaches and the XA2C framework is presented.

The framework is defined based on the dataflow paradigm (visual diagram compositions) while taking advantage of both Mashups and XML‐oriented visual languages by defining a well‐founded modular architecture and an XML‐oriented visual functional composition language based on colored petri nets allowing functional compositions. The framework takes advantage of existing XML alteration/adaptation techniques by defining them as XML‐oriented manipulation functions. A prototype called XA2C is developed and presented here for testing and validating the authors' approach.

This paper presents a detailed description of an XML‐oriented manipulation framework implementing the XML‐oriented composition definition language.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce an expressive query language, called relational XML query language (RXQL), capable of dealing with heterogeneous Extensible Markup Language (XML) documents in data‐centric applications. In RXQL, data harmonization (i.e. the removal of heterogeneous factors from XML data) is integrated with typical data‐centric features (e.g. grouping, ordering, and aggregation).

RXQL is based on the XML relation representation, developed in the authors' previous work. This is a novel approach to unambiguously represent semistructured data relationally, which makes it possible in RXQL to manipulate XML data in a tuple‐oriented way, while XML data are typically manipulated in a path‐oriented way.

The user is able to describe the result of an RXQL query straightforwardly based on non‐XML syntax. The analysis of this description, through the mechanism developed in this paper, affords the automatic construction of the query result. This feature increases significantly the declarativeness of RXQL compared to the path‐oriented XML languages where the user needs to control the construction of the result extensively.

The authors' formal specification of the construction of the query result can be considered as an abstract implementation of RXQL.

RXQL is a declarative query language capable of integrating data harmonization seamlessly with other data‐centric features in the manipulation of heterogeneous XML data. So far, these kinds of XML query languages have been missing. Obviously, the expressive power of RXQL can be achieved by computationally complete XML languages, such as XQuery. However, these are not actual query languages, and the query formulation in them usually presupposes programming skills that are beyond the ordinary end‐user.

The purpose of this paper is to reduce the number of join operations for retrieving Extensible Markup Language (XML) data from a relational database.

The paper proposes a new approach to eliminate the join operations for parent‐child traversing and/or sibling searching such that the performance of query processing could be improved. The rationale behind the design of the proposed approach is to distribute the structural information into relational databases.

The paper finds that the number of join operations which are needed for processing parent‐child traversal and sibling search can be bounded under the proposed approach. It also verifies the capability of the proposed approach by a series of experiments based on the XMark benchmark, for which it has encouraging results.

Compared with previous approaches based on the structure encoding method, the proposed approach needs more space to store additional immediate predecessor's IDs. However, the approach has similar performance to others and it is much easier to implement.

The experimental results show that the performance of the proposed approach is less than 3 per cent of the well‐known MonetDB approach for processing benchmark queries. Moreover, its bulkloading time is much less than that for the MonetDB. There is no doubt that the approach is efficient for accessing XML data with acceptable overheads.

This paper contributes to the implementations of XML database systems.

A temporal XML database could become an inconsistent model of the represented reality after a retroactive update. Such an inconsistency state must be repaired by performing corrective actions (e.g. payment of arrears after a retroactive salary increase) either immediately (i.e. at inconsistency detection time) or in a deferred manner, at one or several chosen repair times according to application requirements. The purpose of this work is to deal with deferred and multi-step repair of detected data inconsistencies.

A general approach for deferred and stepwise repair of inconsistencies that result from retroactive updates of currency data (e.g. the salary of an employee) in a valid-time or bitemporal XML database is proposed. The approach separates the inconsistency repairs from the inconsistency detection phase and deals with the execution of corrective actions, which also take into account enterprise’s business rules that define some relationships between data.

Algorithms, methods and support data structures for deferred and multi-step inconsistency repair of currency data are presented. The feasibility of the approach has been shown through the development and testing of a system prototype, named Deferred-Repair Manager.

The proposed approach implements a new general and flexible strategy for repairing detected inconsistencies in a deferred manner and possibly in multiple steps, according to varying user’s requirements and to specifications which are customary in the real world.

This paper provides an introduction to the Metadata Object Description Schema (MODS), a MARC21 compatible XML schema for descriptive metadata. It explains the requirements that the schema targets and the special features that differentiate it from MARC, such as user‐oriented tags, regrouped data elements, linking, recursion, and accommodations for electronic resources.

To help to clarify the role of XML tools and standards in supporting transition and migration towards a fully XML‐based environment for managing access to information.

The Ching Digital Image Library, built on a three‐tier architecture, is used as a source of examples to illustrate a number of methods of data manipulation for presentation processing. An SQL relational database is implemented in the data tier and Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS) is used to manage processes and sessions in the middle tier. Extensible Markup Language (XML) is used in the data tier to represent offers and in the presentation tiers to represent screen displays that can be manipulated using the XML Document Object Model (DOM), XML Data Islands, and XSL (eXtensible Stylesheet Language), before being delivered to the web browser as HTML.

It is demonstrated that, although XML itself is not a database, the XML family provides many, though not all, of the components found in databases. XML coupled with a database gives greater power than the sum of the parts in a web application.

This paper is a digital image library case study with practical generic tutorial elements about the role and function of XML in modern database‐backed web sites.

As business globalisation and internet usage continue to grow, the internet‐based version of data warehouse systems (DWS) is expected to improve traditional DWS. However applying the web‐based interfaces to client‐server‐based DWS structures may cause problems such as inflexibility, inefficiency, loss of scalability, and threats to security. These arise due to the complexity of manipulation and management of heterogeneous data with various categories of decisional tasks. This paper seeks to develop a flexible mechanism by applying Extensible Markup Language as a foundation for an internet‐based DWS and to overcome the weaknesses of solely client‐server‐based DWS architecture.

For better control and security the proposed architecture utilises an embedded pull‐push mechanism to propagate the distributed decision information. This research also justifies the feasibility of the proposed mechanism by implementing a prototype, evaluating its performance, and conducting a real business case study.

The results indicate that the mechanism can not only improve DWS scalability and efficiency, but also enhance security.

The proposed architecture provides a support mechanism for business intelligence to efficiently and flexibly help companies make the right decisions in real time, grasp business opportunities and gain competitive advantage.

Today, eXtensible Markup Language (XML) is fast emerging as the dominant standard for storing, describing, representing and interchanging data among various enterprises systems and databases in the context of complex web enterprises information systems (EIS). Conversely, for web EIS (such as ecommerce and portals) to be successful, it is important to apply a high level, model driven solutions and meta‐data vocabularies to design and implementation techniques that are capable of handling heterogonous schemas and documents. For this, we need a methodology that provides a higher level of abstraction of the domain in question with rigorously defined standards that are to be more widely understood by all stakeholders of the system. To‐date, UML has proven itself as the language of choice for modeling EIS using OO techniques. With the introduction of XML Schema, which provides rich facilities for constraining and defining enterprise XML content, the combination of UML and XML technologies provide a good platform (and the flexibility) for modeling, designing and representing complex enterprise contents for building successful EIS. In this paper, we show how a layered view model coupled with a proven user interface analysis framework (WUiAM) is utilized in providing architectural construct and abstract website model (called eXtensible Web, xWeb), to model, design and implement simple, usercentred, collaborative websites at varying levels of abstraction. The uniqueness xWeb is that the model data (web user interface definitions, website data descriptions and constraints) and the web content are captured and represented at the conceptual level using views (one model) and can be deployed (multiple platform specific models) using one or more implementation models.

To provide a more requirements‐driven workload model for eXtensible Markup Language (XML) benchmark over the electronic data exchange and management in collaborative commerce.

A three‐component workload requirements model is formulated. They are the XML object model, the XML query operation model, and the control model. The object model extended from W3C data model gives a set of more generic data and document model. The query model enhanced from current and common benchmarks gives a more generalized set of standard and open queries against XML data and documents. The control model compiled from TPC and industry standards gives a set of more systematic experimental variables and performance metrics to set up and conduct an XML benchmark.

The long‐standing research issues of domain dependency and application irreproducibility of XML benchmarks are addressed, tackled and offered with a novel and computer‐aided alternative. Precision and cost‐effectiveness through a synthetic, standard, and scalable set of requirements‐driven workload model are presented.

XML constructs, constraints, and controls are investigated both in terms of data and documents. Workload formulation from the requirements analysis is explored. In‐depth schema, query, and control model to provide scalability and portability can be applied is developed.

Enterprise information integration over heterogeneous data sources has to be achieved through XML. Performance measurement and evaluation on XML is vital. With a more generic and generalized design, XML benchmark can become the key to the success of B2Bi interoperability and performance.

An origin of requirements‐driven benchmark modeling over collaborative commerce is presented. A novel extension on W3C XML model is created. A innovative enhancement from current XML benchmarks' query model is developed.