Cool Stuff Track

Chairs: Jim Hendler and Rohit Khare

Speakers and Abstracts

Jeffrey McManus
eBay and Web Services
eBay, the World's Online Marketplace, is a community of 105 million users worldwide. eBay provides a cross-platform XML-based API to help businesses participate in the eBay marketplace, and it recently expanded its Web services offering by adding SOAP integration capabilities to the eBay SDK. Join us as Jeffrey McManus takes us through the eBay Web services offering, from a discussion of what led them to pursue Web services to an analysis and description of technologies used, through to demonstrations of companies currently using Web services to connect to the eBay marketplace.

Bio: Jeffrey McManus Currently a senior manager of developer relations at eBay, McManus has over 15 years experience as a developer, technology manager and technical writer. He is proficient in many development technologies, and has written six books. These include the C# Developer's Guide to ASP.NET, XML and ADO.NET and the VB.NET Developer's Guide to ASP.NET, XML and ADO.NET (Addison Wesley, 2002).

Bryan Thompson, Hicks & Associates, Inc.
 XPointer and HTTP Range: Scalable data access for RDF

This presentation will review the application of the HTTP protocol and the XPointer Framework to an extensible and scalable solution for RDF data access using existing standards. The presentation represents late-breaking work coordinated between Hicks and Associates and the Mind Lab of the University of Maryland on data access protocols for RDF and XTM triple stores (aka semantic web servers) and their clients

The presentation will review how the HTTP/1.1 protocol, how that protocol provides an extensible mechanism for addressing logical ranges of a resource representation, how the XPointer Framework may be combined with the HTTP/1.1 protocol to provide for transport of only those triples identified by an RDF query expression, and how the same framework may be trivially applied to support graph update. This will be demonstrated in the context of a the context of a semantic web tool for the management of an image database being developed by the University of Maryland.

Liam Quin, XML Activity Lead, W3C
 Lessons From an XML Query-Qriven SVG+XHTML Web Site

XML Query is a database query language for manipulating collections of data presented as XML. It is as yet largely untested in the field, although as the specification solidifies and implementations become more common, the first flowers are starting to blossom, and the results are promising for a full harvest. In this paper the author describes a web site back end that uses XML Query to integrate a relational database, RDF image descriptions and a geographical database to support searching of a collection of royalty free images. The web site has a variety of output formats including an SVG graphical mode.

The queries are sored in template files, so that they could be edited easily. A library of XML Query functions is provided for the template writer, both for ease of authoring and for long-tem stability. Physical properties of the scanned images (file size, width, height and so forth) are stored in a relational database; metadata about what the images depict is stored in RDF; there is also an XML file describing the proximity of geographical regions. This separation was done partly to explore the integration possibilities of XML Query, and partly to help ensure a clean map/terrain separation in the metadata. The resulting search facility is in use, although currently with only a few hundred images. Three user interfaces are provided, to attempt to address differing user needs. Two of these are in (X)HTML, and one in SVG allowing users to drag thumbnails around and to explore their inter-relationships.

Galax was used as an XML Query engine because of its strong typing via XML Schema, aiding development significantly. Queries are generated on the fly based on the input options and templates, and a results cache helps to reduce load on a busy system.

The talk discusses the architecture used, the development, and the difficulties encountered, ranging from the technical (such as generating random placement of objects using the purely functional XML Query language) to the philosophical (such as separating the description of representations such as actual image scans out from the objects depicted). The work is unusual because it uses XML Query to tie together a range of data sources all presented as XML, and in this shows how XML is solving problems that a decade ago were major expenses in consulting projects.

The software was quick to develop, and shows clearly the benefits of using XML as a communication format at all points of a system.

Future work may include an exploration of RDF representations of inexact dates and time-lines (e.g., This castle was constructed in approx. 1230 CE), further use of XML Schema to simplify queries and increase robustness, extension of the SVG interface, and the use of full text and updates to improve the searching and metadata. http://www.holoweb.net/~liam/download/xmleurope/paper.html