Semantic-based approach to streaming XML contents using Xstream

Abstract

XML (eXtensible Markup Language) has been developed and deployed by domain-specific standardization bodies and commercial companies. We investigate the possibilities and issues encompassing the use of generalized XML in a wireless computing environment. Current approaches of fragmenting data do not take into account of the semantics and structure of the data, therefore ignoring the specific needs of individual application. We propose a middleware, Xstream (XML Streaming) for augmenting XML contents by leveraging on the rich semantics and structural characteristics of the XML document into autonomous units, which are known as XDU (Xstream Data Unit). In this paper we describe the framework and the techniques involved and study the performance of the techniques.