Oracle XML Research Articles

A practical application of our MDD approach for modeling secure XML data warehouses

Data warehouses are systems that provide useful information to support the decision making process, thus improving organizations' business processes. These systems integrate heterogeneous sources which are not only limited to their internal business data but also include data from the Web, the latter of which have become increasingly more important in the decision making process in recent years. This has motivated the extensive use of XML in the implementation of data warehouses, in a manner which facilitates data and metadata interchange among the heterogeneous data sources from the Web and the data warehouse. However, the business information that data warehouses manage is crucial and highly sensitive, and must be carefully protected. Security is thus a key issue in the design of data warehouses, regardless of the implementation technology used. It is important to note that the data available on the Web requires particular security considerations which have been specifically tailored to these systems in order to permit their particularities to be captured correctly. Unfortunately, although security issues have been considered in the development of traditional data warehouses, current research lacks approaches with which to consider security when the target platform is based on XML technology.In order to deal with this situation, in this paper we propose a methodological approach for the model driven development of secure XML data warehouses. We also specify a set of transformation rules that are able to automatically generate not only the corresponding XML structure of the data warehouse from secure conceptual data warehouse models, but also the security rules specified within the data warehouse XML structure, thus allowing both aspects to be implemented simultaneously. We additionally introduce our secure XML DW development approach, in which the secure conceptual DW data model, the PIM, is transformed into a secure XML DW, as a PSM, by applying a set of transformation rules. Our proposal is validated through the practical application of our model driven development approach for Modeling Secure XML Data Warehouses to a case study, which is based on a central Airport DW. We first describe the transformation rules defined, then use a step by step illustration to show how they will be applied to the secure conceptual model of the case study to obtain the Secure XML Data Warehouse, thus demonstrating the benefits of our proposal, and finally we analyze how to achieve the secure implementation into commercial database management systems, providing details of the secure implementation in Oracle XML DB 11g.

BotXminer: mining biomedical literature with a new web-based application

This paper outlines botXminer, a publicly available application to search XML-formatted MEDLINE® data in a complete, object-relational schema implemented in Oracle® XML DB. An advantage offered by botXminer is that it can generate quantitative results with certain queries that are not feasible through the Entrez-PubMed® interface. After retrieving citations associated with user-supplied search terms, MEDLINE fields (title, abstract, journal, MeSH® and chemical) and terms (MeSH qualifiers and descriptors, keywords, author, gene symbol and chemical), these citations are grouped and displayed as tabulated or graphic results. This work represents an extension of previous research for integrating these citations with relational systems. botXminer has a user-friendly, intuitive interface that can be freely accessed at .

Portable C/C++ code for portable XML data

Ch XML packages integrate an embeddable C-compatible interpreter with XML C/C++ toolkits giving developers the option of using portable C/C++ scripts to process portable XML data. XML is changing the world of information sharing and exchange by letting users clearly define their data and documents for specific tasks, such as electronic data interchange, content management, or publishing. XML uses context encapsulation to separate content from presentation and to support a hierarchical structure among data from various sources. XML data is reusable, easily derivable, and reconfigurable. However, XML-based applications need a programming technology to perform processing-related tasks such as parsing, generating, manipulating, and validating the data. Application developers commonly use toolkits based on C/C++, such as Gnome's XML C parser and toolkit, Oracle's XML developer's Kit for C/C++ (XDK), and Microsoft's XML parser. These toolkits reflect the rich set of facilities, data types, operators, control structures, and runtime library functions that make C/C++ such a popular programming language. In fact, these tools, as well as the large number of skilled C/C++ programmers, often make C/C++ the preferred language for building portable systems.