Prof. Dr. Wolfgang May
Lars Runge, M.Sc., Sebastian Schrage, M.Sc.

Date and Time:

• Wednesday 10-12 ct, IFI SR 2.101
• Friday 14-16 ct, IFI SR 2.101

Lecture and Exercises mixed (see announcements on this page)

Module M.Inf.1141, 4 SWS, 6 ECTS.
The module's home is the MSc studies in Applied CS. It can also be credited in the BSc studies in Applied CS (as "Vertiefung Softwaresysteme und Daten"),
and in several other studies:
BSc/MSc Wirtschaftsinformatik, Mathematik (BSc/MSc), Teaching/2-Fach-Bachelor, PhD GAUSS, ...

Course Description

One of the most important facts that lead to the overall success of XML is that the "XML world" combines a lot of already known concepts in an optimal way for coping with a broad spectrum of requirements. The course will first review some of these preceding (partially even historic) concepts (network database model, relational databases, object-oriented databases) and the integration of data and metadata (SchemaSQL). Then, the idea of "semistructured data" is introduced by showing early representatives that helped to shape the XML world (F-Logic, OEM).

In the main part, XML is presented as a data model and a markup-meta-language, and the current languages of the concepts of the XML world are systematically investigated and applied: DTD, XPath, XQuery, XSLT, XLink, XML Schema, and SQL/XML.

The lecture uses the geographical sample database "Mondial" in its XML version for illustrations.

For practical exercises, the XML software is installed in the IFI CIP Pool. The software playground page can be found here; the XPath/XQuery/XSLT Web interface is available here.
The sample code fragments can be found in the CIP pool under /afs/informatik.uni-goettingen.de/course/xml-lecture/ .

Dates & Topics

• 18.10.: Administrativa, Overview, ...
  Smartboard notes
• 20.10. Introductory Presentation "XML"
  [Slides]
  Smartboard notes
  
• 25.10.: General concepts and notions of the database area.
  Slides: Relational Model
  Earlier database models, concepts and extensions: Basic Concepts and Notions; example and recall: relational model.
  Slides: data models
  Smartboard notes (the timeline of data models)
• 27.10.: Earlier database models, concepts and extensions: Network data model
  Smartboard notes
• Some references to read about database history (optional):
  • The developers of RDBMS and SQL look back in 1995.
  • Funding a Revolution (relevant here: Chapter 6 "The Rise of Relational Databases").
  • A Survey (1991) of the development of database technology, including an outlook ... to today: Database Systems: Achievements and Opportunities. A. Silberschatz, M. Stonebraker, J. Ullman, Comm. of the ACM, Oct. 1991.
• Note: Tuesday, 31.10. is this year a holiday in Germany
• 1.11.: "History" continued: Object-Oriented Model/ODMG
  Smartboard notes
• 3.11.: "History" continued - academic prototypes: SchemaSQL
  Smartboard notes
• 8.11.: "History" continued - academic prototypes: early semistructured data models (Tsimmis/OEM/F-Logic)
  Slides: early semistructured data models
  Smartboard notes
• 10.11.: XML: data model, language, DTDs etc.
  Slides: XML basics
  Smartboard notes
• 15.11.: No lecture
• 17.11.: XML: data model, language, DTDs etc. (cont'd)
  Smartboard notes
• 22.11.: XML: data model, language, DTDs etc. (cont'd)
  Exercise Sheet 1 (XML basics, parsing, grammar aspects) - solutions will be discussed during the subsequent lectures.
  Smartboard notes
• 24.11.: Discussion of Exercises 4 and 5 of sheet 1; Solution.
  Lecture: XML (cont'd)
  Smartboard notes
• 29.11.: Discussion of Exercise 6 sheet 1;
  Lecture: XPath: navigation and addressing language for XML
  Slides: XPath
  Smartboard notes
• 1.12.: XPath (cont'd)
  Smartboard notes
  Exercise Sheet 2 (XPath)
• 6.12.: discussion of some exercises of sheet 2; Solution. Lecture XPath (cont'd)
  (no SmartBoard notes today)
• 8.12.: XPath (cont'd)
  Smartboard notes
• 13.12.: discussion of some exercises of sheet 2;
  Lecture: rest of XPath
  Slides: XQuery
  Smartboard notes
• 15.12.: Lecture XML Query Languages: History/Evolution - XQL, XML-QL; then XQuery
  Exercise Sheet 3 (XQuery)
• 20.12.: Discussion of Exercise 2.4; Lecture: XQuery
  Smartboard notes
• 22.12.: No lecture
• Lecture-free period: 23. Dezember 2017 until 07. Januar 2018
• 10.1.2018: Discussion of exercise sheet 3; Solution.
  Smartboard notes
• Announcement: Praktikum/Lab course XML SS2018
• Announcement: Deductive Databases SS2018
• 12.1. Lecture: Updating XML Data
  (no SmartBoard notes today)
• 17.1.2018 NO LECTURE!!!! (due to an extremely shortly announced meeting)
• 19.1. Discussion of Exercise Sheet 3
  For the Mondial-Hamlet-Exercise, the following problem occurred: Smartboard notes.
  This is actually a bug in saxon: hamletmondial.txt
  Lecture: Updating XML Data (same slide set as XQuery); the transformation language: XSLT
  Slides: XSLT
  Exercise Sheet 4 (XSLT)
• 24.1. Lecture: XSLT
  Smartboard notes.
  The XSLT example "mondial-simple.xsl" was dynamically extended to mondial-example.xsl to illustrate the main ideas of XSLT.
• 26.1. Lecture: XSLT
  (no SmartBoard notes today)
• 31.1. Discussion of Exercise Sheet 4 (XSLT); Solution.
  Smartboard notes.
  
• Ergebnis der Vorlesungsevaluierung
• 2.2. Overview of XML Schema
  Smartboard notes.
  Slides: XML Schema (note: the XML Schema atomic datatypes are also used in the RDF data model)
  ... short overview of the remaining slide set (which belongs to the XML lab course):
  • XML in SQL/SQLX - Slides: XML and Databases
    SQL Web interface (in addition to the Mondial tables, the tables mondial, countryXML, cityXML used on the slides exist)
  • Global referencing in XML - the linking languages: XPointer and XLink [they have nearly no practical relevance since RDF is used for Open Linked Data]; The HTML anchors ("a"-tags) are very simple XLinks.
    Slides: XLink
  • Programming XML with Java APIs:
    Slides: XML and Java - DOM, SAX etc
    Slides: JAXB, XML Digester
    Slides: Web Services
• 2.2.2018 End of lecture period.

Exams

• Oral exams (in german or in english), between 5.2.2018 and April 2018, to choose between several slots.
  • Exam period in February: 5.2.-23.2.2018
  • Exam period in March: 5.3.-27.3. (extended)
  • Exam period in April: 4.4.-20.4.2018
    (Summer term lectures start on Aril 9, Easter Sunday is April 1st)
  • all three slots are available in FlexNow (FlexNow lists only the first day of the slot since it is not really appropriate to organize oral exams); registration for each of them ends one week before the first exam date.
  • Please contact may at informatik.uni-goettingen.de for the individual appointments/slots
  • the exams take place in my office, room IFI 2.107