Friday, January 26, at 327 Yost
Refreshments: 3:30 - 4:00 p.m, Talk: 4:00
- 5:00 p.m.
Database systems are considered as fundamental tools for managing data.
Traditional databases are for structured, record oriented data. Today,
there are also massive amounts of not-so-structured data (mostly
unstructured text data) to be managed due to online information traffic on
the Internet, and growing numbers and sizes of web pages. As the size and
the complexity of data on the web grow, such documents on the web are
increasingly being generated automatically from databases as opposed being
generated manually. Hence, the document data on the web has some sort of
regularity in structure. This leads to research on semistructured data,
referring to data with some underlying structure not as strict as that of
highly structured data models of traditional databases, such as the
relational model. XML is a new standard for data representation on the web
and for exchange of semistructured and structured data among computer systems.
In this talk, first I will briefly go over database systems fundamentals,
relational databases, semistructured data and XML. Then, I will discuss
some research problems in databases involving semistructured data.