Much research work has recently focused on the problem of representing historical information in XML. In this paper, we describe an ongoing work to represent XML changes. Our model is a three-dimensional XML-based model (3D_XML in short) for representing and querying histories of XML documents. The proposed model incorporates three time dimensions, valid time, transaction time, and efficacy time without extending the syntax of XML. We use XQuery to express complex temporal queries on the evolution of the document contents. We believe that native XML databases (NXDs) present a viable alternative to relational temporal databases when complex time dependent data has to be manipulated and stored. So NXDs will be our choice.

Since its introduction in 1997, the M-tree became a respected metric access method (MAM), while remaining, together with its descendants, still the only database-friendly MAM, that is, a dynamic structure persistent in paged index. Although there have been many other MAMs developed over the last decade, most of them require either static or expensive indexing. By contrast, the dynamic M-tree construction allows us to index very large databases in subquadratic time, and simultaneously the index can be maintained up-to-date (i.e., supports arbitrary insertions/deletions). In this article we propose two new techniques improving dynamic insertions in M-tree—the forced reinsertion strategies and so-called hybrid-way leaf selection. Both of the techniques preserve logarithmic asymptotic complexity of a single insertion, while they aim to produce more compact M-tree hierarchies (which leads to faster query processing). In particular, the former technique reuses the well-known principle of forced reinsertions, where the new insertion algorithm tries to re-insert the content of an M-tree leaf that is about to split in order to avoid that split. The latter technique constitutes an efficiency-scalable selection of suitable leaf node wherein a new object has to be inserted. In the experiments we show that the proposed techniques bring a clear improvement (speeding up both indexing and query processing) and also provide a tuning tool for indexing vs. querying efficiency trade-off. Moreover, a combination of the new techniques exhibits a synergic effect resulting in the best strategy for dynamic M-tree construction proposed so far.

V tomto příspěvku se zbýváme extrakcí informací z webových zdrojů převážně textového charakteru. K tomuto účelu jsme se pokusili využít několik lingvistických nástrojů pro zpracování přirozeného textu v češtině. Jmenovitě se jedná o nástroje pražského projektu PDT a český WordNet. Cílem příspěvku je přiblížit možnosti, které tyto nástroje pro extrakci informací z textu poskytují. Extrakcí informací se zde zabýváme především v kontextu sémantického webu a zkoumáme možnosti, jak tyto nástroje využít pro automatizaci sémantické anotace stránek současného webu.

We have developed and implemented [1,2] infrastructure and RDF storage for the Semantic Web. When we filled it with data the need for some tool that could explore the data became evident. Unfortunately, none of existing solutions fulfills requirements imposed by the data and users expectations. This paper presents our RDF visualizer that was designed specifically to handle large RDF data by means of incremental navigation. A detailed description of the algorithm is given as well as actual results produced by the visualizer.

In this paper we introduce a new M-tree building method, utilizing the classic idea of forced reinsertions. In case a leaf is about to split, some distant objects are removed from the leaf (reducing the covering radius), and then again inserted into the M-tree in a usual way. A regular leaf split is performed only after a series of unsuccessful reinsertion attempts. We expect the forced reinsertions will result in more compact Mtree hierarchies (i.e., more efficient query processing), while the index construction costs should be kept as low as possible. Considering both low construction costs and low querying costs, we examine several combinations of construction policies with reinsertions. The experiments show that forced reinsertions could significantly decrease the number of distance computations, thus speeding up indexing as well as querying.

As the XML has become a standard for data representation, it is inevitable to propose and implement techniques for efficient managing of XML data. A natural alternative is to exploit features of (object-)relational database systems, i.e. to rely on their long theoretical and practical history. The main concern of such techniques is the choice of an appropriate XML-to-relational mapping strategy. In this paper we focus on enhancing of user-driven techniques which leave the mapping decisions in hands of users who specify their requirements using schema annotations. We describe our prototype implementation called UserMap which is able to exploit the annotations more deeply searching the user-specified “hints” in the rest of the schema and applies an adaptive method on the remaining schema fragments. Using a sample set of supported fixed mapping methods we discuss problems related to query evaluation for storage strategies generated by the system, in particular correction of the candidate set of annotations and related query translation. And finally, we describe the architecture of the whole system.

As the popularity of XML as a format for data representation grows the need for storing XML data in an effective way grows as well. Recent research has provide us with effeective solutions based on storing XML data into relational databases and with new technologies based on storing XML data in the native form. However, design of XML databases has not been studied su±ciently yet. In this paper, we suppose a set of XML schemes that describe XML representation of our data in several types of XML documents. We show that we can not usually store the data directly in this representation because it can contain redundancies. To design an optimal database schema we therefore need to locate these redundancies and eliminate them.We describe two types of redundancies in XML data in this paper and show how to utilize a conceptual schema of the XML schemes to locate such redundancies. We also show how to normalize the XML schemes to eliminate these redundancies.

XBW [10] is modular program for lossless compression that enables testing various combinations of algorithms. We obtained best results with XML parser creating dictionary of syllables or words combined with Burrows-Wheeler transform - hence the name XBW. The motivation for creating parser that handles non-valid XML and HTML files, has been system EGOTHOR [5] for full-text searching. On files of size approximately 20MB, formed by hundreds of web pages, we achieved twice the compression ratio of bzip2 while running only twice as long. For smaller files, XBWhas very good results, compared with other programs, especially for languages with rich morphology such as Slovak or German. For any big textual files, our program has good balance of compression and run time. Program XBW enables use of parser and coder with any implemented algorithm for compression.We have implemented Burrows-Wheeler transform which together with MTF and RLE forms block compression, dictionary methods LZC and LZSS, and finally statistical method PPM. Coder offers choice of Huffman and arithmetic coding.