Digital Libraries play an important role in education; they are beneficial to both instructors and students. Many Web file-based course material systems have been built, but most of them do not have effective management mechanisms. Instead, they often have broken links and do not support metadata. To transfer these course materials from a file repository to an integrated and searchable educatio...

Successful data integration relies on knowledge of (i) the structural shape of constituent data sources, and (ii) semantic knowledge of how structural terms map together, or how structure maps to structure. In this paper, we propose a simple extension to the relational model which allows these types of metaknowledge to be stored directly within relational sources and then incorporated into quer...

Many Data Grid services maintain persistent metadata in remote relational databases. However, existing relational database systems are neither grid enabled nor web service enabled, adversely affecting cross-organizational interoperability and reuse. The European Data Grid’s Data Management Work Package addresses these issues with Spitfire. The Spitfire service gridenables a wide range of relati...

ion: Metadata are given at different levels of abstraction, a conceptual and a relational level. This makes an abstract case understandable and re-usable. Data and Case documentation: The database objects (tables or views) as well as their conceptual counterparts are declaratively stored. So is the chain of preprocessing operations, including all operators’ parameter settings etc. All entities ...

Abstract Effective query optimization is a core feature of any database management system. While most techniques make use simple metadata, such as cardinalities and other basic statistics, are based on more advanced metadata including data dependencies, functional, uniqueness, order, or inclusion dependencies. This survey provides an overview, intuitive descriptions, classifications execution s...

Metadata is essential for understanding information stored in data warehouses. It helps increase levels of adoption and usage of data warehouse data by knowledge workers and decision makers. A metadata model is important to the implementation of a data warehouse; the lack of a metadata model can lead to quality concerns about the data warehouse. A highly successful data warehouse implementation...

Unbiased metabolomic surveys are used for physiological, clinical and genomic studies to infer genotype-phenotype relationships. Long term reusability of metabolomic data needs both correct metabolite annotations and consistent biological classifications. We have developed a system that combines mass spectrometric and biological metadata to achieve this goal. First, an XMLbased LIMS system enab...

The authors propose two algorithms for generating a DTD and an XML document respectively from the metadata and the content of a relational database without any intermediary language or user intervention. Such algorithms always generate semantically correct XML output by respecting database functional dependencies represented in a graph structure they take as input. Finally, different XML repres...

The problem of records retention is often viewed as simply deleting records when they have outlived their purpose. However, in the world of relational databases there is no standardized notion of a business record and its retention obligations. Unlike physical documents such as forms and reports, information in databases is organized such that one item of data may be part of various legal recor...