The Open Information Systems Journal

2009, 6 : 108-122
Published online 2009 August 26. DOI: 10.2174/1874133900903010108
Publisher ID: TOISJ-3-108

MAXDOR: Mapping XML Document into Relational Database

Ibrahim Dweib , Ayman Awadi and Joan Lu
School of Computing and Engineering, University of Huddersfield, UK.

ABSTRACT

The eXtensible Markup Language (XML) is used for representing and exchanging data through the Internet, but this technology needs a suitable medium for storing these data. At present, three common technologies can be used to store and retrieve XML documents, i.e., native XML database, Object oriented Database (OODB) and Relational Database (RDB). This paper describes a general method for mapping XML documents to relational database. The method does not need a DTD or XML schema. It uses global label approach for identifying each token in XML document. Three label are added to each token; parent labels, left sibling and right sibling; to facilitate insertion and update process and makes this cost constant, in contrast of previous approaches that need to relabelled following or descendants tokens. The method can also be used for data-centric and document-centric documents. Experiments on this method show its ability to maintain document structure at a low cost price and building of the original document is straight forward.

Keywords:

XML, labelling XML, schema less, relational database.