Views for Semistructured Data
Serge Abiteboul, Roy Goldman, Jason McHugh, Vasilis Vassalos, Y. Zhuge · 1997
Defining a view over a semistructured database introduces many new problems. In this paper we propose a view specification language and consider the problem of answering queries posed over views. The two main approaches, query rewriting and view materialization, are outlined with focus on the difficult problems caused by the semistructured nature of the data. 1 Introduction Views are intended primarily to increase the flexibility of a database system by adapting the data to user or application needs. View mechanisms have been studied extensively in the context of the relational model [Ull89, KS91] and, more relevant to us, in the context of the object database model [Ber91, AB91, SAD94, LST91, Run92]. This paper describes some preliminary work towards implementing a view mechanism in the Lore system [MAG + 97], a DBMS specifically designed to query semistructured data [Abi97]. A unique motivation for views when dealing with semistructured data is that views can be used to introduce ...