US-Turkey Cooperative Research: Query Languages for XML with Multimedia Presentations

Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland OH

Investigators

Abstract

9912229 Ozsoyoglu Description: This project supports a cooperative project by the Professor Gultekin Ozsoyoglu, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science research at Case Western Reserve University (CWRU), Cleveland, Ohio and Dr. Ozgur Ulusoy, Department of Computer Engineering and Information Science, Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey. They plan to investigate query languages for XML, the Extensible Markup Language which is proposed as a standard web Markup language by the World Wide Web Consortium. The research has two goals: to study ways of storing XML documents into databases, and querying such databases; and to extend XML with multimedia presentations, and investigate XML-embedded multimedia presentation storage, delivery, and querying. XML specifications do not yet incorporate content-based multimedia data modeling within XML documents. In addition, present semistructured data manipulation languages and data models do not yet deal with multimedia, much less with presentations and synchronization issues in XML documents in the web. This research will model content-based multimedia data as well as multimedia presentations within XML, revise/merge/consolidate XML language proposals and multimedia data/presentation languages, and investigate the query processing issues of the resulting newly defined languages. Scope: The topic is widely recognized as a critical problem area for the next generation of global information systems. XML is clearly emerging as the standard according to which data (publications as well as other data) will be made available on the Internet. We are in the early stages of the full specification of XML and in the infancy of database support for XML data. The CWRU group has experience with multimedia databases. The group at Bilkent has complimentary expertise in distributed and real-time systems. Literature and other resources for the project are easily obtained from the Web; thus students in Turkey working on this project will not need specialized facilities. In addition to the collaboration with a colleague in Turkey, there will be training of a Turkish graduate student at the CWRU facilities. This project fits the mission of the Division of International Programs (INT) for support of mutually beneficial research.