Abstract
This paper proposes an approach to representing and querying semistructured Web data. The proposed approach is based on nested tables, which may have internal nested structural variations to accommodate semistructured data. Our motivation is to reduce the complexity found in typical query languages for semistructured data and to provide users with an alternative for quickly querying data obtained from multiple-record Web pages. We show the feasibility of our proposal by developing a prototype for a graphical query interface called QSByE (Querying Semistructured data By Example). For QSByE, we define a particular variation of nested tables and propose a set of QBE-like operations that extends typical nested-relational-algebra operations to handle semistructured data. We show examples of how users can pose interesting queries using QSByE.
This work was partially supported by Project SIAM (MCT/CNPq/PRONEX grant number 76.97.1016.00) and by CNPq (grant number 467775/00-1). The first and second authors are supported by scholarships from CAPES. The fourth author is supported by NSF (grant number IIS-0083127).
On leave from the University of Amazonas, Brazil.
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da Silva, A.S., Evangelista Filha, I.M.R., Laender, A.H.F., Embley, D.W. (2002). Representing and Querying Semistructured Web Data Using Nested Tables with Structural Variants. In: Spaccapietra, S., March, S.T., Kambayashi, Y. (eds) Conceptual Modeling — ER 2002. ER 2002. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 2503. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45816-6_20
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45816-6_20
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