A Faceted-Navigation System for QCDml Ensemble XML Data

In this paper we describe a faceted navigation system for QCDml ensemble XML data, which is an XML-based metadata format for ILDG (International Lattice Data Grid). A faceted navigation system allows a user to search for one´s desired information in an exploratory way, thereby enabling the user to browse a set of XML data without using specialized query languages such as XPath and XQuery. However, designing a faceted navigation interface for XML data is not straightforward due to the tree and flexible, tree-like nature of XML. In this work, we attempt to design and implement a dedicated faceted navigation system for QCDml on top of an XML database. The interface is designed by taking the domain experts´ usability into account. We also care about the system´s performance. In general, the process of faceted navigation is computationally expensive because of the need for aggregate computation of each available facets. In order to alleviate this, we make use of a relational database system as the engine to speed up the aggregate computation. We finally demonstrate the implemented faceted navigation system, which has been made available on the Web.