Cooperative Research on Web Data Management at UFMG and UFAM - A Brief Report

The World Wide Web has become a huge repository of data of interest for a variety of application domains. However, the same features that have made the Web so useful and popular also impose important restrictions on the way the data it contains can be manipulated. Particularly, in the traditional Web scenario, there is an inherent difficulty in gaining access to data that is implicitly present in Web pages but is not readily available. The term Web Data Management (WDM) has been used to refer to the study of problems related to fetching, extracting, querying, modeling, storing, transforming, and integrating data available on the Web. These issues have been growing in importance in the scientific community in the last years, as it can be be seen by the considerable space devoted to them in important publication venues. This interest is justified not only by the scientific and technical challenges involved in WDM problems, but also, and specially, by the growing demand from the industry for solving such problems. In this paper, we present a brief report on the WDM cooperative research carried out by the Database Laboratory at the Federal University of Minas Gerais (LBD/UFMG) and the Information Technology Group at the Federal University of Amazonas (GTI/UFAM). The main aim of this research effort is to develop methods and tools for dealing with data available on the Web and in other non-structured sources (e.g., XML documents), thus providing facilities similar to those available in traditional database systems for managing such data.