Data processing: database and file management or data structures – Database design – Data structure types
Reexamination Certificate
1999-12-06
2002-07-09
Rones, Charles L. (Department: 2171)
Data processing: database and file management or data structures
Database design
Data structure types
C707S793000, C707S793000, C707S793000, C707S793000, C709S229000, C709S203000
Reexamination Certificate
active
06418448
ABSTRACT:
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
1. Field of the invention
This invention relates to data and metadata management over the internet for navigating, querying and manipulating any kind of information by using and executing high level specifications in Resource Description Framework and by supporting multiple object relational database resources over the web. With the advancement of World Wide Web, a large number of different types of objects (text, file, audio, video, image as well as relational data) are being created everyday. Internet can be visualized as a large single database. Querying and manipulating such a large database from many different perspectives is a nontrivial task. Additionally, transactions over the web, electronic commerce with complex buyer/seller relationships and distributed many tier application architecture are also posing demand for new technology solutions. This invention relates to those specific technology needs (a) by incorporating advanced metadata specifications in extensible markup language for implicit generation of object SQL queries in conjunction with navigational capabilities and (b) by incorporating need-based persistent connectivity through object brokers to support transactions over database web entities.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Internet is becoming an important channel for retail commerce as well as business to business transactions. The number of web buyers, sellers and transactions is growing at a rapid pace. But the potential for the internet for truly transforming commerce and business still remains to be fully realized. Electronic purchases are still largely non-automated. Software techniques are required to automate several of the most time consuming stages of web surfing and buying/selling processes. Additionally, business to business web transactions are demanding seamless query facilities over all kinds of information at the front end web portal sites as well as at the back end relational databases in a connected enterprise. Uniform querying, decision support and transactional characteristics need to be present over any kind of web data despite of the fact that data may or may not be immediately present in a single relational database. So far transactional and query capabilities are limited to data residing inside a relational database whereas text and multimedia data residing at a web site are only viewed by the use of Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML). The World Wide Web was originally built for human consumption, and although everything on it is machine-readable, everything is not machine-understandable. It is hard to automate anything on the web, and because of the volume of information the web contains, it is not possible to manage it manually.
W3C (web address http://www.w3c.org) is an international industry consortium to lead the World Wide Web to its full potential by developing common protocols that promote its evolution and ensure its interoperability. The solutions so far proposed by W3C in Extensible Markup Language (XML) and Resource Description Framework (RDF) incorporate metadata to describe the data contained on the web. Metadata is “data about data” or specifically “data describing Web resources” in the context of the World Wide Web. The distinction between “data” and “metadata” is not an absolute one and it is a distinction created primarily by an application. Programs and autonomous agents can gain knowledge about data from metadata specifications.
The RDF model draws well-established principles from various data representation communities. RDF properties may be thought of as attributes of resources and in this sense correspond to traditional attribute-value pairs. The basic model consists of three object types,:
(1) Resources: All things being described by RDF expressions are called resources. A resource may be an entire Web page; for example the HTML document http://www.w3.org/Overview.html. A resource may be a part of a Web page; e.g. a specific HTML or XML element within a document source. A resource may also be a whole collection of pages; e.g. an entire Web site. Resources are identified by universal resource identifiers or URIs. Anything can have URI; the extensibility of URIs allows the introduction of identifiers for any imaginable entity.
(2) Properties: A property is a specific aspect, characteristic, attribute or relation used to describe a resource. Each property has a specific meaning, defines its permitted values, the types of resources it can describe, and its relationship with other properties.
(3) Statements: A specific resource together with a named property plus the value of that property for that resource is a RDF statement. These three individual parts of a statement are called, respectively, the subject, the predicate and the object. The object of a statement (i.e. the property value) can be another resource or it can be a literal, i.e. a resource (specified by a URI) or a simple string or other primitive data type defined by XML.
A simple example statement “John Doe is the creator of the resource http://www.w3.org/home/John” has the Subject (resource) http://www.w3.org/home/John, Predicate (property) as “Creator” and Object (literal) as “John Doe”. Meaning in RDF is expressed through reference to a schema. A schema is a place where definitions and restrictions of usage for properties are documented. In order to avoid conflicts in definitions of the same term, RDF uses the XML namespace facility where a specific use of a word is tied to the dictionary (schema) where the definition exists. Each predicate used in a statement must be identified with exactly one namespace, or schema. RDF model also allows qualified property value where the object of the original statement is the structured value and the qualifiers are further properties of a common resource. To represent a collection of resources, RDF uses an additional resource that identifies the specific collection. This resource should be declared to be an instance of one of the container object types, namely,
(1) Bag (an unordered list of resources or literals),
(2) Sequence (an ordered list of resources or literals) and
(3) Alternative (a list of resources or literals that represent alternatives for the single value of a property).
A common use of containers is the value of a property. When used in this way, the statement still has a single statement object regardless of the number of members in the container; the container resource itself is the object of the statement.
Use of metadata was so far popular in relational databases to describe attributes, number and types of columns in tables, foreign-key/primary-key relationships, views etc. in a relational schema. SQL (Structured Query Language) queries made against a relational schema are resolved by fetching metadata from data dictionaries (or repository for metadata definitions) to interpret data fetched from data files during execution of a relational operation. Query executions are independent of any application domain specific features. In a similar manner, Resource Description Framework (RDF) is a foundation for representing and processing metadata and data for the World Wide Web; it provides interoperability between applications that exchange machine-understandable information on the web. The broad goal of RDF is to define a mechanism for describing resources that makes no assumptions about a particular application domain, nor defines the semantics of any application domain. RDF relies on the support of XML (extensible markup language) and its model resembles an entity-relationship diagram. In object-oriented design terminology, resources correspond to objects and properties correspond to instance variables. To facilitate the definition of metadata, RDF represents a class system much like object-oriented programming and modeling systems. A collection of classes is called a schema. Schemas may themselves be written in RDF.
Representation of “data about data” (metadata) to achieve application independent interoperable solutions carries the basic similarity between relational
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