WebOQL: Restructuring documents, databases, and Webs

The widespread use of the Web has originated several new data management pr oblems, such as extracting data from Web pages and making databases accessi ble from Web browsers. It has also renewed the interest in problems that ha d appeared before in other contexts, such as querying graphs, semistructure d data and structured documents. Several systems and languages have been pr oposed for solving each of these Web-data management problems, but none of these systems addresses all the problems from a unified perspective. Many o f these problems essentially amount to data restructuring: we have informat ion represented according to a certain structure and we want to construct a nother representation of (part of) it using a different structure. We prese nt the WebOQL system, which supports a general class of data restructuring operations in the context of the Web. WebOQL synthesizes ideas from query l anguages for the web, for semistructured data and for Web site restructurin g. (C) 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.