WebOQL: restructuring documents, databases and Webs

Abstract

The widespread use of the Web has originated several new data management problems, such as extracting data from Web pages and making databases accessible from Web browsers, and has renewed the interest in problems that had appeared before in other contexts, such as querying graphs, semistructured data and structured documents. Several systems and languages have been proposed for solving each of these Web data management problems, but none of these systems addresses all the problems from a unified perspective. Many of these problems essentially amount to data restructuring: we have information represented according to a certain structure and we want to construct another representation of (part of it) using a different structure. We present the WebOQL system, which supports a general class of data restructuring operations in the context of the Web. WebOQL synthesizes ideas from query languages for the Web, for semistructured data and for Website restructuring.