XML database schema refinement through functional dependencies and normalization

Other Title(s)

تحسين قواعد بيانات (الاكس ام ال)‎ بواسطة دالات التبعية و عملية التبسيط

Dissertant

al-Shamma, Zaynah Zuhayr

Thesis advisor

Aqil, Misbah M.

Comitee Members

Naum, Riyad Shakir
Isa, Ghassan Farid

University

Middle East University

Faculty

Faculty of Information Technology

Department

Department of Computer Information Systems

University Country

Jordan

Degree

Master

Degree Date

2012

English Abstract

As eXtensible Markup Language (XML) has become the standard means for storing and exchanging data over the Web, the methods for designing XML database schemas are becoming more and more important.

XML documents may contain redundant information due to the bad design of XML schemas.

Redundantly stored information can lead to take up unnecessary storage space, inflates data storage and transfer cost; furthermore, it leads to operation anomalies.

One approach to remove data redundancies in XML documents is based on normalization theory.

This approach proposed XML normal forms (XNFs) to determine whether an XML schema is properly designed or not.

Then the XML schema is redesigned or refined to satisfy some XNFs based on the supposed known XML functional dependencies (XFDs).

The research about XFD and XML document normalization on the basis of XFD is still an open problem.

In this thesis, we first present a formal definition of the XML Schema Definition (XSD), and then we improve the definition of XFD according to the hierarchical structure of XSD.

Since the main goal of identifying XFDs is to detect the possible redundancy they may cause, we defined an XNF that generalizes BCNF.

We also define a set of normalization rules for converting any XSD into one in XNF.

Finally, we design and implement the process of XML normalization through a semiautomated XML Normalizer tool.

The XML Normalizer is very useful for designer to facilitate, accelerate and accurate the process of normalization.

We evaluate our approach through examples.

The results demonstrate that the XML schema generated by XML normalizer contribute to a normal form schema.

Main Subjects

Information Technology and Computer Science

No. of Pages

73

Table of Contents

• APA
• MLA
• AMA

Language

English

Data Type

Arab Theses

Record ID

BIM-695040