Querying XML with Lore (abstract)

Jennifer Widom, Stanford University

About 4 years ago I started a research project in managing schema-less "semistructured" data -- data that may be irregular or incomplete, and whose structure may evolve rapidly and unpredictably. The "Lore" system we developed is a complete DBMS, including a powerful query language and processor, designed specifically for semistructured data. Fortuitously, the semistructured data model upon which we originally based Lore is very similar to XML, and we are quickly moving Lore to full XML compliance.

I'll provide an overview of Lore and its expressive OQL-based query language, "Lorel" (for Lore Language). Time permitting, I'll also briefly describe Lore's indexing capabilities, cost-based query optimizer, dynamic structural summaries, and proximity search capabilities. Logistics permitting, I'll give a demo of Lore and its query interfaces, and I'll show Lore serving as an XML query engine behind Microsoft's XML-based auction demo.

To find out more about Lore or experiment with the on-line demos please visit http://www-db.stanford.edu/lore.