Studierstube XML Database

Overview

Studierstube is a scientific platform for contriving and developing Augmented Reality applications. Naturally, in the context of research, a large number of documents and a lot of resulting data has to be managed. Up to now, the collaborators of this platform solely utilized the file system of their workstations to persistently store and organize the accruing data. As one can imagine, at a certain point of time, this form of organization will come across its limits. When a certain amount of data is exceeded or the data needs to be interconnected and easily shared between the collaborators, an appropriate storage system, i.e. a database, is needed.

In the scope of a master thesis we have implemented an XML Database system. Starting from the choice of three candidate databases, we have have selected the one, which is best complying with the requirements of the Institute. According to the Client/Server architecture, we have installed and set up a central database server as a common storage system. The client applications accessing this database are part of Studierstube, which is the current research project of the group. In order to seamlessly integrate the XML database technology into Studierstube applications, we have designed and implemented a programming interface, which provides access to the database using XML query languages like XPath and XQuery. Finally, the implementation of the system was tested by means of a sample application, called BAUMLBrowser, which is processing XML documents stored in the database.

The following articles and documents describe the results of this work. 

Articles

XML Databases compared - A detailed evaluation of three native XML databases that describes the reasons for our choice of XML database server.

Database and API Design - Design requirements and result for the Studierstube XML database

Database and API Implementation - Some details about the implementation.

Manuals

Studierstube XML Database API Documentation - Doxygen documentation for the proposed stbxml API. 

BAUMLBrowser Application and API documentation - Documentation of the BAUMLBrowser application and the general core component which should be portable.

Installation and configuration guide - A guide describing the prerequisites and the configuration of the Tamino database server.

 Links

XML Links - Links to sites related to XML

w.frieb@gmx.net, September 2004