Abstract
Applications and services that access Web data are becoming increasingly more useful and wide-spread. Web query languages provide efficient and effective means to access and process data published on the Web. Conventional Web query languages such as XQuery, XSLT, or SPARQL, however, focus only on one of the different data formats used on the Web and provide little to ease the integration of heterogeneous schemata or representations. Xcerpt is a versatile semi-structured query language, i.e., a query language able to access all kinds of Web data such as XML and RDF in the same language reusing common concepts and language constructs. In this article, we demonstrate how Xcerpt’s features ease the integration of data sources that are heterogeneous in (a) data format (e.g., XML vs. RDF), (b) schema, and (c) concrete representation (if the schema allows representational variants). The results show that versatile Web query languages form a convenient foundation for data integration scenarios on the Web and suggest further consideration of their use in developing data-centricWeb applications.

URL:
http://rewerse.net/publications/rewerse-publications.html#REWERSE-RP-2006-034

BibTeX:

@inproceedings{REWERSE-RP-2006-034,
	author = {Fran\c{c}ois Bry and Tim Furche and Benedikt Linse},
	title = {Let's Mix It: Versatile  Access to Web Data in Xcerpt},
	booktitle = {Proceedings of 3rd Workshop on Information Integration on the Web, Edinburgh, Scotland (22nd May 2006)},
	year = {2006},
	url = {http://rewerse.net/publications/rewerse-publications.html#REWERSE-RP-2006-034}
}