INFO-H-509 : XML and Web Technologies

The evolution of the World Wide Web has seen an explosion of data communication technologies, protocols, and standards such as XML, DTDs, XML Schema, XPath, XSLT, DOM, SAX, RDF, OWL, … . In this course we decipher this alphabet soup of web technologies. The global goal is to obtain both a fundamental insight into the formal theory behind these technologies as well working knowledge of how they are used in practice.

The main course objectives and developed competences, as well as the examination modalities are summarized in the course plan (general course information document).

• Course responsible: Stijn Vansummeren (Bâtiment U, étage 4, local UB4.125, Campus Solbosch)
• Assistant: Gilles Dejaegere

• The course is taught in the second semester and comprises 5 crédits ECTS
• The course's syllabus consists of (1) the course notes distributed on this web site and (2) the book by A. Moller and M. Schwartzbach, An Introduction to XML and Web Technologies. Addison-Wesley, 2006. ISBN-13: 978-0-321-26966-9
• Attention! The lecture slides are only made available for the convenience of the students but do not suffice as syllabus! Please be sure to aquire a copy of the book!
• Evaluation is by written exam (closed book) and project work.

In this first lecture (slides) we (1) overview the content and objectives of the course and (2) discuss the history of the Web and its overall architecture (URIs, resources, representations). In particular we have looked at the working of the HTTP protocol and gave a very brief overview of HTML and CSS.

Required reading:

• RFC 3986 Uniform Resource Identifier (URI): Generic Syntax - Only Section 1 “Introduction”
• Architecture of the World Wide Web, Volume One - Only Sections 1,2,3
• HTTP made really easy (Note that this document uses an outdated interpretation of the term “resource”)
• The book chapter 1 (pages 3-31) and chapter 8 (pages 343-361).
• The slides

Lecture 2 has introduced XML and XPath in depth.

Required reading:

• Chapter 2 and chapter 3 (except section 3.6) in the book
• The corresponding slides.

Lecture 3 has introduced (1) the motivation behind XML Schema Languages, (2) syntax and semantics of DTDs, and (3) regular expressions.

See pages 92-113 in the book as well as the corresponding slides.

In Lecture 4, we have discussed the limitations of DTDs. Some of these limitations are lifted by XML Schema, whose syntax and semantics were studied during lecture 4.

See pages 113-158 in the book as well as the corresponding slides.

The example XML Schema files used during the theory lecture is also available for download.

Construct an XML Schema Definition for the information recorded by a bookshop (full assignment).

This assignment is to be made in groups of two persons and contributes 2/20 to the overall grade (there are two more assignments to follow, each contributing 2/20). The written exam contributes the remaining 14/20 points.

See the full assignment for related dealine(s), what the solution should entail, and to whom it should be submitted).

Practical session 1

You can test your Xpath query in the folder containing saxon9he.jar with the following command: java -cp “saxon9he.jar” net.sf.saxon.Query -s:“<sourcefile>” -qs:'<query>' -o:“<outputfile>”

• A. Moller and M. Schwartzbach. An Introduction to XML and Web Technologies. Addison-Wesley, 2006. ISBN-13: 978-0-321-26966-9
• The XML Recommendation.
• The XHTML Recommendation.
• The Unicode Consortium.
• Efficient Algorithms for Processing XPath Queries (Paper)
• A video lecture on asymptotic notation
• T. Berners-Lee, J. Hendler, and O. Lassila. The Semantic Web. Scientific American, 2001.
• F. Malona and E. Miller. RDF Primer. W3C, 2004.