Project Xanadu: XML- and active-database-unified approach to distributed e-commerce

To model and implement EC business models like e-brokers on the Web, we need business modeling, distributed processing, and data compression as enabling technologies. We have designed an active query language for Web-distributed XML databases, called XBML, as an approach to business process modeling. We efficiently process XBML queries by using min-max and semi-join methods as distributed query optimization in the Web context. We also compress XML data for reducing overheads of storage and transmission and guaranteeing transparent access to compressed data through existing application interfaces. The authors describe the Xanadu project consisting of three research topics