Interoperability on XML Data

Laks V. S. Lakshmanan^*
University of British Columbia
Vancouver, BC, Canada
laks@cs.ubc.ca

Fereidoon Sadri^**
University of North Carolina at Greensboro
Greensboro, NC, USA
sadri@uncg.edu

Abstract

We study the problem of interoperability among XML data sources. We propose a lightweight infrastructure for this purpose that derives its inspiration from the recent semantic web initiative. Our approach is based on enriching local sources with semantic declarations so as to enable interoperability. These declarations expose the semantics of the information content of sources by mapping the concepts present therein to a common (application specific) vocabulary, in the spirit of RDF. In addition to this infrastructure, we discuss tools that may assist in generating semantic declarations, and formulation of global queries and address some interesting issues in query processing and optimization.

* Supported by NSERC.
** Supported by NSF grant IIS-0083312.