The Highly Acclaimed and the Highly Practical
Date on the Web: From Relations to Semistructured Data and XML
By Serge Abiteboul, Peter Buneman, and Dan Suciu
Morgan, Kaufman, 2000, 257 pp.
$39.95
DocBook: The Definitive Guide
Norman Walsh and Leonard Muellner
O'Reilly & Associates, 1999, 635 pp.
$36.95
Because industry and academia are more closely intertwined in computer science than in most other areas, you can usually determine what to expect from the computer industry in three or four years by examining what academics are doing right now. Serge Abiteboul, Peter Buneman, and Dan Suciu provide a picture for the near future of XML by describing their current research in Data on the Web: From Relations to Semistructured Data and XML.
XML has largely been positioned as both a replacement for HTML and as a language for data exchange between applications. Both descriptions are accurate, but neither does real justice to the overall implications of a commonly accepted standard for marking up data. On the other hand, the authors see XML as a way of reconciling document-centric and database technologies.
This reconciliation is exactly the problem for many organizations trying to publish data on the Web today. People want to take vast quantities of data from heterogeneous sources and make it easily available and viewable in document form.
XML addresses this problem by providing a neutral, self-describing format for expressing data. The authors refer to this type of self-describing data as "semistructured."
