CPS 216 Spring 2005
Homework #3
Assigned: Tuesday, March 29
Due: Tuesday, April 12
Problem 1.
Consider an XML document (from a project called XMark) modeling the data maintained by
an Internet auction site in /home/dbcourse/examples/xml-xmark/auction.xml. The
main entities modeled are: items, persons, open auctions, closed auctions, and categories.
• iteminfo elements describe items that are for sale or that already have been sold.
Each item carries a unique identifier and bears properties like payment method (credit
card, money order, etc.), a reference to the seller, a description, etc., all encoded as
subelements. Each item belongs to a world region represented by the iteminfo’s
parent.
• Open auctions are auctions in progress. Their properties include the bid history (i.e.,
increases over time) along with references to the bidders, a reference to the seller, a
reference to the iteminfo being sold, etc.
• Closed auctions are auctions that are finished. Their properties include references to
the seller and the buyer, a reference to the respective iteminfo, the price, the
quantity of items sold, etc.
• Persons are characterized by name, email address, phone number, mail address, profile
of their interests, a set of open auctions they watch, etc.
• Categories feature a name and a description; they are used to implement classification
of items. A category graph links categories into a network.
The figure below illustrates the part of the document structure that is relevant to the problem:
site
regions people open_auctions closed_auctions
{africa,asia,...}
iteminfo
description
address
name
street
person
name
city country
zipcode
open_auction
bidder itemref seller
date
time personref
increase
initial
closed_auction
itemref
seller bu yer
price
incategory
On rack40, use the following query with saxonxq
<result>{doc("/home/dbcourse/examples/xml-xmark/auction.xml")}</result>
to get an overview of the document. Please refer to the document “XML Programming Notes”
on the course Web site for instructions on running saxonxq, the Saxon XQuery processor.
