Juliana's Projects

Semi-structured data management

• LegoDB: LegoDB is a cost-based XML storage mapping engine that explores a space of possible XML-to-relational mappings and selects the best mapping for a given application. LegoDB leverages current XML and relational technologies: 1) it models the target application with an XML Schema, XML data statistics, and an XQuery workload; 2) the space of configurations is generated through XML-Schema rewritings; and 3) the best among the derived configurations is selected using cost estimates obtained through a standard relational optimizer. Experiments show that the LegoDB mapping engine is very effective in practice and can lead to reductions of over 50% in the running times of queries compared to previous mapping techniques.
  • For more details about the LegoDB mapping engine, see our paper at ICDE2002 and the slides of my presentation at ICDE. (Updated on 03/02/2002)
    
• StatiX: The availability of summary data for XML documents has many applications, from providing users with quick feedback about their queries, to cost-based storage design and query optimization. StatiX is a novel XML Schema-aware statistics framework that exploits the structure derived by regular expressions (which define elements in an XML Schema) to pinpoint places in the schema that are likely sources of structural skew, and builds concise, yet accurate, statistical summaries for XML data. StatiX leverages standard XML technology for gathering statistics, notably XML Schema validators, and it uses histograms to summarize both the structure and values in an XML document.
  • For more details about StatiX, see the official StatiX Web page. You can also check: our paper at SIGMOD2002 and the slides of my presentation at SIGMOD. (Updated on 06/23/2002)
    

Web Site Testing and Verification

• VeriWeb: The recent emphasis and growth in the area of e-business and e-commerce makes Web site testing critical. Testing your e-business application ensures that you can satisfy your customers' needs whether they are your actual e-commerce customers or members of your supply chain. With today's competitive market, companies must provide e-business functions smoothly, without problems, as well as provide better service than their competitors. The goal of VeriWeb is to create a Web testing engine that is both automated and integrated. Although the precise degree of automation is still to be determined, the engine will, at a minimum, exercise multiple scenarios in a web application that are automatically discovered by the system, and testers need not manually enter scenarios. The engine will be integrated in the sense that it will provide functional testing of both the static and dynamic elements of a Web service, regression testing, as well as standard correctness checks (e.g., broken links, malformed URLs).

Accessing, Integrating and Publishing Web Data

• WebViews: The main objective of this project is to develop technology that simplifies the creation of robust personalized views of the Web, by customizing and combining content and services from multiple Web sites. The ability to easily create customized Web views is crucial for Internet service providers, telecommunications carriers, and Internet-based businesses, as they need to offer Web content -- originally intended for display on PCs and laptops -- to users of increasingly popular wireless devices, including cell phones and personal digital assistants. For more details about WebViews check our paper at WWW10. The slides of my presentation at WWW10 are also available . (Updated on 5/7/2001)
  

• WebVCR and SmartBookmarks: Given the growing trend of creating interactive Web sites that publish data on demand, retrieving information from the Web is becoming increasingly complicated. Many sites, from online classified ads to banks, require users to fill a sequence of forms and/or follow a sequence of links to access a page they need, and often, these hard-to-reach pages cannot be bookmarked using the bookmark facilities implemented in popular browsers. The WebVCR allows users to create shortcuts -- smart bookmarks --- to Web pages that require multiple steps to be retrieved - and thus makes it easy to automate the tedious and repetitive process of retrieving hard to reach Web content. For more information about the system and to try out the beta version, go to the WebVCR home page (only inside Lucent).

  A paper describing the system appeared in WWW9 (ps-gz version) and slides of my presentation at WWW9 are also available.

• Web Integrator: The Web Integrator is a webbase system that integrates data from various Web sources, and allows users to query these Web sources as if they were a single database (see our SIGMOD'99 paper for more details).

Data Integration

• MetaComm (DST): MetaComm is a meta-directory that integrates data from various telecom devices. It creates and maintains a combined materialized view of the data stored in the devices, allowing a single point of administration. Fundamental enabling technologies for MetaComm include support for updatable integrated views of multiple (independent) databases and the addition of active functionality to LDAP servers. DST was first demonstrated publicly at Interop in May 1999. See our ICDE'00 paper for more details.

• Web Integrator: see description above.