XDBMap

Abstract

The proliferation of XML for the data exchange on the Web in various application domains has resulted in a great deal of research efforts on mapping between XML data and existing database models, such as relational, object-oriented, and so on. The existing XML-database mapping systems are tightly coupled with underlying DBMSs supporting their own database models only. Their mapping solutions and mapping languages are subject to ambiguity in distinguishing between user-level mapping scheme and implementation-level mapping. Their mapping languages support unidirectional mapping at a time, XML to database or vice versa. Also, the languages derived from XML cannot support data type without additional element or attribute definition. The mapping language, XDBMap reported in this thesis makes the user-level scheme independent from the implementation-level. It provides universal data mapping between XML and any database models. Using the XDBMap, implementation details can be hidden from user, while the implementation level can take more flexibility. XDBMap is defined using XML Schema Language, so that it inherits complex content modeling and data type declaration capability from XML Schema Language. XDBMap also provides single-mapping and multiple-mapping in that defines XML-database mapping scheme that takes place between one class of XML and one or more databases at once. XDBMap provides bidirectional mapping between XML and a database with one mapping scheme. In this thesis, we discuss the proposed XML-data mapping language, XDBMap and a mapping system using the XDBMap.