Re: Relational Tables and structured documents

Jonathan Robie (jonathan@texcel.no)
Sat, 21 Mar 1998 22:37:31 -0500

At 12:11 PM 3/19/98, Peter Murray-Rust wrote:
>I have been spending the last two weeks working on a molecular application
>which essentially consists of relational tables. The application is
>largely hierarchical (a protein molecule) so that it benefits from being
>recast into structured document form. I have therefore found it useful to
>create routines which generate nodes in a tree as a result of joining tables.
>
>I expect this is a common operation (e.g. creation of orgCharts from
>relational tables). XML would seem to provide a useful approach,
>especially client-side (most humans don't read relational tables very
>well). Excuse my ignorance, but is this a sufficiently generic application
>that there are well-understood rules for it and is there scope for a
>generic XML approach?

This is rather analogous to the object-to-relational mapping problem. If
you define schemas in XML and define a mapping onto the relational
database, there is a solution. Or you can have someone define how the joins
should be made to create the XML elements. There is not, of course, a
general solution for looking at a relational database and making a sensible
set of "objects" out of it. There's been some research into inferring
structure from relational tables, but nothing that has been that good in
the general case.

Jonathan

jonathan@texcel.no
Texcel Research
http://www.texcel.no