Storing Semistructured Data with STORED

Abstract

Systems for managing and querying semistructured-data sources often store data in proprietary object repositories or in a tagged-text format. We describe a technique that can use relational database management systems to store and manage semistructured data. Our technique relies on a mapping between the semistructured data model and the relational data model, expressed in a query language called STORED. When a semistructured data instance is given, a STORED mapping can be generated automatically using data-mining techniques. We are interested in applying STORED to XML data, which is an instance of semistructured data. We show how a document-type-descriptor (DTD), when present, can be exploited to further improve performance.