ASTERIX: A Scalable Platform for XML Information Analysis
Creators: name: University Of California Office Of The President
Publisher: name: University of California Office of the President
publisherIdentifier: https://ror.org/00dmfq477
publisherIdentifierScheme: ROR
Year: 2024

description: Over the past decade, the evolution of the human side of the Web (powered by HTML and HTTP) has revolutionized the way that we find things, buy things, and interact with our friends and colleagues, both within and across organizations. Behind the scenes, XML and Web services are having a similar impact on the machine side of the Web. XML is enriching information on the Web and our ability to find and interchange it meaningfully; industry verticals have created XML-based standards for inter-organization data exchange; and, XML-based middleware has gained significant adoption in support of enterprise Service-Oriented Architecture initiatives. XML is also increasingly being used for document markup, and the emerging Software as a Service (Saas) trend - founded on Web services - is changing the way organizations will access and use large applications in the future. It seems that the IT world will soon be awash in a sea of XML data, and that XML data and services will play an increasingly prominent role in the IT landscape for years to come. In anticipation of the XML explosion, we are starting a project at UC Irvine aimed at indexing, ingesting, storing, processing, analyzing, and also publishing vast quantities of XML data. The project, ASTERIX (Active, Scalable, Transactional Enterprise Repository for Information in XML), will attack the problem of scale via the “best practice” for scalable information processing system design; the hardware platform for ASTERIX will be a large, shared-nothing cluster of computers. ASTERIX must support the widely diverse kinds of XML data that arise in different use cases. Some XML data is well-tagged and highly regular in structure; other data is well-tagged but has a priori unknown structure that varies significantly from one data instance to the next; still other data is tagged but its content is largely textual in nature. ASTERIX aims to exploit structural information when available, but also to support the storage and retrieval of semi-structured data and content-based searching. California is home to numerous companies that will be affected by the XML explosion. These include enterprise infrastructure software vendors like Oracle, Teradata, and others, as well as Internet commerce companies like eBay and SaaS providers like SalesForce.com. In addition, it is home to companies in different vertical application areas, such as Life Sciences, where document and information management and analysis play a central role in the management of their “corporate jewels”. ASTERIX has the potential to positively impact such companies through technological innovations that can be incorporated in infrastructure company products, through the creation of a scalable, open source software platform that might be used to manage and analyze some of their information, and through the production of well-trained students who they can hire to help develop XML-related systems, software, and applications.