NIAGARA: Design and Implementation

Overview

Niagara can be used for retrieving XML data, querying and monitoring them for some interesting changes. These three functionalities are implemented by its three main components: Search Engine, Query Engine and Trigger Manager. XML is gaining popularity for representing semi-structured data on the net. Additionally it is being used as a medium for data exchange. Self-describing nature of XML data help in doing a better job of retrieving relevant sources, when compared to a plain text file. For example if we are looking for a ship named "Montreal", then all the current search engine will give us data sources that will most likely contain information about the city named "Montreal". With our XML search engine we can return data sources that will contain the name "Montreal" in the ship element.

Slides from the 1999 DB-Affiliates meeting

Acknowledgements

The Niagara project is supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant Number 0086002.