SilkRoute:: trading between relations and XML

XML is the standard format for data exchange between inter-enterprise applications on the Internet. To facilitate data exchange, industry groups define public document type definitions (DTDs) that specify the format of the XML data to be exchanged between their applications. In this paper, we address the problem of automating the conversion of relational data into XML. We describe SilkRoute, a general, dynamic, and efficient tool for viewing and querying relational data in XML, SilkRoute is general, because it can express mappings of relational data into XML that conforms to arbitrary DTDs. We call these mappings views. Applications express the data they need as an XML-QL query over the view. SilkRoute is dynamic, because it only materializes the fragment of an XML view needed by an application, and it is efficient, because it fully exploits the underlying RDBMs query engine whenever data items in an XML view need to be materialized. (C) 2000 Published by Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.