Optimising XML-Based Web Information Systems

Abstract. Many Web Information Systems incorporate data and activities from multiple organisations, often at different geographical (and cultural) locations. Many of the solutions proposed for the necessary integration in Web Information Systems involve XML as it provides an interoperable layer between different information systems. The impact of this approach is the construction of large XML stores and often there is a need to query XML databases. The work presented in this paper supports the web computing environment by ensuring that this canonical representation (XML) of data can be efficiently processed regardless of potentially complex structures. Specifically, we provide a metamodel to support query optimisation for Web Systems that employ XPath