XML/RDF Digital library

Project Manager: Daniel Dardailler <danield@w3.org>
Author of this document: Oreste Signore <oreste.signore@cnuce.cnr.it>

Created: 26 March 2003. Last updated: 26 March 2003.

Table of Content:

• Introduction

Introduction

The main task has been to develop a user interface to query complex and specialized XML documents corpora (like juridical documents, cultural heritage cataloguing cards, user manuals, etc.).
At the lower level, we have the XCDE library developed at the Department of Computer Science, University of Pisa. The core of the library (indexing and compressing algorithms) remain property of their authors. The library is written in C and provides a set of efficient algorithms and data structures for indexing and searching an XML document collection.
The documents must be well-formed and may be heterogeneous in that they may reflect different DTDs. The library supports the storage and management of these XML files in native form, operating directly at the File System level. The main features of the library are: state-of-the-art algorithms and data structures for text indexing, compressed space occupancy, and novel succinct data structures for the management of the hierarchical structure of the XML document.
The user interface gets the document structure from the XMLSchema, and makes use of some RDF facilities to broadening or narrowing query terms, implementing a graphical browsing of thesauri, in order to support semantic equivalences for more effective searches.
The possibility of querying different document collections, where semantically equivalent data element are stored in different XML document structures, has also been considered.

Progress to date

At the present stage, the following components have been completed and are under test:

• a parser to get a simplified XMLSchema. It supports date, numeric, dictionary, thesaurus and string datatypes.
• A tranformer from XMLSchema to a XHTML tree, allowing the navigation upon the tree
• A form builder based upon the processed XMLSchema.
• A sample webservice to check query terms agains a dictionary
• A test application to navigate a thesaurus in order to select one or more values to insert in the query text

• Zope as application server
• Python as programming language
• Soaplib Python
• Postgresql (storage of dicionaries and thesauri)

Complete deliverable: http://www.weblab.isti.cnr.it/projects/QH/docs/deliverable.html

See the demo at http://www.weblab.isti.cnr.it/projects/QH/demo/schema

See the report (in PDF) on the XCDE library.

Deviations from plan

none.