UserMap - An Adaptive Enhancing of User-Driven XML-to-Relational Mapping Strategies

As the XML has become a standard for data representation, it is inevitable to propose and implement techniques for efficient managing of XML data. A natural alternative is to exploit features of (object-) relational database systems, i.e. to rely on their long theoretical and practical history. The main concern of such techniques is the choice of an appropriate XML-to-relational mapping strategy. This paper focuses on enhancing of user-driven techniques which leave the mapping decisions in hands of users who specify their requirements using schema annotations. The paper describes the prototype implementation called UserMap which is able to exploit the annotations more deeply searching the user-specified "Hints" in the rest of the schema and applies an adaptive method on the remaining schema fragments.