Lore: A Database Management System for XML
Jennifer Widom
Database Group Faculty
Abstract
Over the past several years database researchers have explored issues
in managing schema-less "semistructured" data: data that may be
irregular or incomplete, and whose structure may evolve rapidly and
unpredictably. The Lore system at Stanford, under research and
development for the past 4 years, is a full-featured DBMS designed
specifically for semistructured data. Fortuitously, Lore's original
data model, called the Object Exchange Model (OEM), is very similar to
W3C's new eXtensible Markup Language (XML), and we have just completed
migrating Lore to full XML compliance.
I will provide an overview of the Lore system and will briefly
highlight some of its more challenging and novel aspects: Lore's
expressive OQL-based query language, indexing capabilities, cost-based
query optimizer, dynamic structural summaries, and proximity search
capabilities. The talk will be followed by a demonstration of Lore's
stand-alone capabilities, and (time permitting) a demonstration of
Lore serving as an XML engine behind a Microsoft prepackaged XML demo.
To find out more about Lore or experiment with the online demos please
visit http://www-db.stanford.edu/lore
The talk presents joint work with Roy Goldman and Jason McHugh.
Biography
Jennifer Widom received her Bachelors degree from the Indiana
University School of Music in 1982 and her Ph.D. from Cornell
University in 1987. From 1987-88 she was a Visiting Assistant
Professor in the Computer Science Department at Cornell. She spent
five years as a Research Staff Member at the IBM Almaden Research
Center before joining the Stanford faculty in 1993.