1. SeLeNe Kick-off Meeting 15-16/11/2002 SeLeNe-related Research At Birkbeck Alex Poulovassilis and Peter T.Wood Database and Web Technologies Group School of Computer Science and Information Systems Birkbeck, University of London

2. SeLeNe Kick-off Meeting 15-16/11/2002 Research in CS & IS at Birkbeck Main groups: Database and Web Technologies Computational Intelligence Bioinformatics Software Engineering Main research funding sources: EPSRC, BBSRC, EU, Wellcome Trust, HEFCE, industry URL http://www.dcs.bbk.ac.uk/~research/groups.htmlhttp://www.dcs.bbk.ac.uk/~research/groups.html

3. SeLeNe Kick-off Meeting 15-16/11/2002 Teaching in CS & IS at Birkbeck Foundation Degree in IT (part-time) BSc Computing (pt) BSc Information Systems and Management (pt) MSc Computing Science (ft and pt) PG Dip & MSc in e-commerce (ft and pt) MSc in Advanced Information Systems (ft and pt) MRes in Computer Science (ft and pt) MPhil/PhD in Computer Science (ft and pt) URL http://www.dcs.bbk.ac.uk/~courses/http://www.dcs.bbk.ac.uk/~courses/

4. SeLeNe Kick-off Meeting 15-16/11/2002 1. ECA Rules for XML This is work by us in collaboration with James Bailey at Melbourne. It is currently being implemented by George Papamarkos, who has just started at Birkbeck as a research student and part-time RA on SeLeNe XML repositories are increasingly being used in dynamic applications where actions need to be taken in a timely fashion in response to updates to the data Thus, there is a need for reactive functionality on XML repositories: event-condition-action (ECA) rules are a natural candidate

5. SeLeNe Kick-off Meeting 15-16/11/2002 ECA Rules ECA rules take the form: on event if condition do action Users/ Apps Event Detection Action Execution Condition Evaluation

6. SeLeNe Kick-off Meeting 15-16/11/2002 ECA rules in Active Databases ECA rules in active relational databases are of the form on insert/delete/update of a table ifSQL condition do SQL statement(s) When an insertion/deletion/update occurs, the DBMS provides a set of instantiations for the variables $new and $old These variables can be used within the condition and action parts of rules

7. SeLeNe Kick-off Meeting 15-16/11/2002 ECA in Active Databases ECA rules are used in conventional data warehouses for generation and incremental maintenance of materialised views checking integrity constraints performing automatic repairs when violations are detected maintaining audit trails of the data maintaining statistics of data warehouse performance and usage By analogy, ECA rules can be used to provide similar functionality on semi-structured data such as XML and RDF.

8. SeLeNe Kick-off Meeting 15-16/11/2002 Our ECA Language for XML In our WWW2002 and Computer Networks 2002 papers, we present a language for defining ECA rules on XML Rather than introducing yet another language for XML, we use fragments of the XPath and XQuery languages within the event, condition and action parts of our ECA rules This allows leverage of ongoing work on XPath and XQuery

9. SeLeNe Kick-off Meeting 15-16/11/2002 Our ECA Language for XML The event part of an ECA rule is of the form INSERT e or DELETE e where e is a simple XPath expression Simple XPath disallows the use of any axis other than the child, parent, self, or descendant-or-self axes, and the use of all functions other than document()

10. SeLeNe Kick-off Meeting 15-16/11/2002 Our ECA Language - Events In a rule event part of the form INSERT e the XPath expression e evaluates to a set of nodes The rule is triggered if this set of nodes includes any node that has been inserted by the most recent update on the XML database The set of instantiations for the variable $delta is the set of new nodes returned by e

11. SeLeNe Kick-off Meeting 15-16/11/2002 Our ECA Language - Events Similarly, in a rule event part of the form DELETE e the XPath expression e evaluates to a set of nodes The rule is triggered if this set of nodes includes any node that has been deleted by the most recent update on the XML database The set of instantiations for the variable $delta is the set of deleted nodes returned by e

12. SeLeNe Kick-off Meeting 15-16/11/2002 Our ECA Language - Conditions The condition part of a rule is either TRUE, or one or more simple XPath expressions connected by and, or, not A rules actions are executed on each XML document which has been changed by an event of the form specified in the rule's event part, for each value of $delta for which the rule's condition is True

13. SeLeNe Kick-off Meeting 15-16/11/2002 Our ECA Language - Actions Each rule action is of the form INSERT r BELOW e or DELETE e e is a simple XPath expression r is a simple XQuery expression Simple XQuery disallows the use of full FLWR expressions, essentially permitting only the Return part of an expression.

14. SeLeNe Kick-off Meeting 15-16/11/2002 An Example An XML database containing two documents s.xml and p.xml:......... …... …

15. SeLeNe Kick-off Meeting 15-16/11/2002 Example (contd) If one or more products are added to a store in s.xml, this rule appends that store to the children of those products in p.xml if its not already a child: Rule 1: on INSERT document('s.xml')/stores/store/product if not (document('p.xml')/products/ product[@id=$delta/@id]/store[@id=$delta/../@id]) do INSERT BELOW document('p.xml')/products/product[@id=$delta/@id]

16. SeLeNe Kick-off Meeting 15-16/11/2002 Example (contd) In a symmetric way, if one or more stores are added to a product in p.xml, this rule appends that product to the children of those stores in p.xml if its not already a child: Rule 2: on INSERT document('p.xml')/products/product/store if not (document('s.xml')/stores/ store[@id=$delta/@id]/product[@id=$delta/../@id]) do INSERT BELOW document('s.xml')/stores/store[@id=$delta/@id]

17. SeLeNe Kick-off Meeting 15-16/11/2002 ECA Rule Analysis We have also developed techniques for analysing the triggering and activation dependencies between our XML ECA rules, described in the two papers mentioned earlier These analysis techniques are also useful beyond ECA rules, since they generally determine the effects of updates upon queries. So can also be used for analysing the effects of other, not necessarily rule-initiated, updates made to an XML repository e.g. to determine if integrity constraints may have been violated, or whether materialised views need to be re-calculated.

18. SeLeNe Kick-off Meeting 15-16/11/2002 Relation to SeLeNe Similarly, we are planning to define an ECA rule language for RDF as part of the SeLeNe project We need to specify the syntax and semantics of: queries (for rule conditions), updates (for rule actions), and events (for rule event parts) e.g. as fragments of FORTH RDF suites RQL language (and the planned extensions to with update facilities for SeLeNe)

19. SeLeNe Kick-off Meeting 15-16/11/2002 Relation to SeLeNe George Papamarkos will implement a prototype RDF ECA rule execution engine Within the SeLeNe architecture, such RDF ECA rules could be used to materialise views and to propagate changes from source learning objects to derived learning objects Also, GP will work on developing techniques for automatically generating such ECA rules from declarative view specifications (c.f. earlier such techniques developed for relational databases)

20. SeLeNe Kick-off Meeting 15-16/11/2002 2. The AutoMed Project In work with Peter McBrien, AP has developed a new framework to support integration of heterogeneous data sources The theoretical foundation of the framework consists of: a new notion of schema equivalence a set of primitive schema transformations which can be composed to define unconditional or conditional equivalences between schemas

21. SeLeNe Kick-off Meeting 15-16/11/2002 The AutoMed Project The modelling constructs of higher-level data models (e.g. relational, object-oriented, semi-structured, XML, RDF) are specified in terms of a low-level hypergraph data model (HDM) The specification of a modelling construct C automatically generates addC, delC and renC primitive schema transformations add and del transformations have as an argument a query Composite schema transformations consist of a sequence of primitive transformations, and allow constructs from different modelling languages to be mixed within the same intermediate schema

22. SeLeNe Kick-off Meeting 15-16/11/2002 Query and Data Translation Schema transformations set up a two-way transformation pathway between pairs of schemas: From a pathway T:S –> S we: compose the queries in the add steps to derive a definition of each construct in S as a view over S, and compose the queries in the del steps to derive a definition of each construct in S as a view over S These view definitions can then be used to automatically translate data and queries between S and S. The process generalises to a set of local schemas being integrated into a global schema

23. SeLeNe Kick-off Meeting 15-16/11/2002 Both-As-View integration Our schema transformation pathways capture at least the information available from global-as-view (GAV) or local-as-view (LAV) We discuss this in a forthcoming paper (ICDE03) and term our integration approach both-as-view (BAV) Unlike GAV and LAV, our framework readily supports the evolution of both local and global schemas (CAiSE02, ICDE03)

24. SeLeNe Kick-off Meeting 15-16/11/2002 Unstructured Text Sources As well as integrating structured and semi-structured data sources, we are also working on extracting structure from unstructured text sources – Dean Williams We are using existing IE technology (the GATE tool from Sheffield) for text annotation. Natural language and domain ontologies will extend these annotations. The extracted information will be matched with existing structured information to derive new facts and perhaps new global schema constructs

25. SeLeNe Kick-off Meeting 15-16/11/2002 Materialised integration Finally, as well as virtual integration of data sources, we are also investigating using the AutoMed framework for materialised data integration i.e. a data warehousing approach In particular, we are looking at incremental view maintenance and data lineage tracing using the AutoMed schema transformation pathways – Hao Fan