XML: where databases and information retrieval meet

Advanced SIKS-course

This course focuses on the use of database and information retrieval techniques for managing large amounts of XML data. XML is the web standard for exchanging data on the world wide web. The standard comes with a number of tools that are available in database systems as well, like schema's (DTDs and XML schema) and query languages (XPath, XQuery), but some things are still missing like efficient storage, query processing and indexing of XML data. As XML is often used to markup textual data, XML data management systems need to support techniques from search engines as well, for instance full-text search and ranking of search results.

See: course programme

A funeral for the Prisma machine

The PRISMA project was a large-scale research effort in the design and implementation of highly parallel data processing on a 100 node shared-nothing architecture. It was organized as a nationwide Dutch research activity with combined forces from four universities, a governmental research institute, and Philips Research Laboratories. It ran from 1986 until end of 1990 and was manned with thirty persons…
Today we put the PRISMA machine to its final resting place.

Read the papers from the Prisma project.