Extensible markup language (XML) is increasingly accepted as a medium for integrating and exchanging data, gradually becoming de facto standard for information exchange. At the same time, object-oriented databases possess powerful data storage capabilities, especially with the widespread adoption of object-oriented database management systems. Consequently, the exchange of data from object-oriented databases to XML becomes crucial, and vice versa, transforming data from XML to object-oriented databases is equally important. In this chapter, the authors propose a comprehensive approach to achieve the transformation of spatiotemporal data between object-oriented databases and XML. We focus on exploring a set of mapping functions and rules to identify the most suitable XML schema that describes the existing object-oriented database. By leveraging the characteristics of XML and object-oriented databases, we successfully accomplish the transformation of spatiotemporal data. This research holds significant importance in achieving seamless data exchange between object-oriented databases and XML.
Top1 Introduction
In the current computer science field, the need for interoperability of autonomous databases results in the multi-database system, which contains heterogeneous or homogenous database. Therefore, transformation between operations of databases with different data models is critical in any heterogeneous multi-database system (Wu et al., 2005). A mount of previous research has focused on the problem of data exchange in different databases, for example, Fong (Fong, 1995; Fong, 2002), Soutou (Soutou, 2001) and Zhang and Fong (Zhang & Fong, 2000). Recently, the web-based applications are more and more popular, XML which is the lingua franca for data exchange on the Internet, has become the de-facto standard of information exchange and coding format (Liu et al., 2006; Lo et al., 2010; Nierrman & Jagadish, 2002; Bai et al, 2015). Especially, the development of XML Schema descriptions such as DTD(Document Type Declaration) (Turowski & Weng, 2002) and XML Schema (Oliboni & Pozzani, 2008) opens new opportunities for effective data representation and handling XML data. But these advantages also bring limitations to presenting its structure using semantics to store data (Fong & Cheung, 2005). Object-oriented databases are considered better than other databases, due to demand for new approaches to deal with complex data and complex relationships. At the same time, object-oriented databases own a strong ability to store data (Ma et al., 2001; Sicilia & Barriocana, 2006). Consequently, the research of data exchange between object-oriented database and XML is critical. There are a lot of efforts in the area, for example, the both-way transformation approach introduced by (Naser et al., 2009), the formal transformation from fuzzy objected-oriented databases to fuzzy XML (Liu & Ma, 2013), and formal approach for reengineering data between XML and object-oriented database in (Liu et al., 2013).
In recent years, spatial (Condotta, 2004) and temporal (Nandal, 2013) information plays an important role in many applications such as the monitoring of environmental changes and the tracking of moving vehicles (Pereira et al, 2016; Mehrotra & Sharma, 2009; Tao et al, 2004). The advent of XML can provide an opportunity for effective representation and the advantages of object-oriented database can cope with complex spatiotemporal data(Huang et al, 2004). Establishing the bridge of spatiotemporal data between object-oriented database and XML is an important research project(Bai & Xu, 2015). However the existing methods are solved the common and static data, they are not suitable to copy with the multidimensional and dynamic spatiotemporal data.
In this chapter, we have investigated the transformation of spatiotemporal data between object-oriented databases and XML. The main contributions of this chapter can be summarized as follows:
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Establishing the relationship between spatiotemporal data in XML and object-oriented database.
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We recognize the significance of transforming spatiotemporal data between object-oriented database and XML, and have developed a set of functions and rules to accomplish the transformation process.
The remaining parts of this chapter are organized as follows. Section 2 begins by introducing the object-oriented spatiotemporal data model. Then, in Section 3, we discuss the transformation of spatiotemporal data from an object-oriented database to XML. Section 4 covers the transformation of spatiotemporal data from XML to an object-oriented database. Finally, in Section 5, we provide a summary of this chapter.