Details of Grant 

EPSRC Reference:	GR/S01733/01
Title:	Spatial Logics for Querying Data on the Web
Principal Investigator:	Gardner, Professor P
Other Investigators:
Researcher Co-Investigators:
Project Partners:
Department:	Computing
Organisation:	Imperial College London
Scheme:	Standard Research (Pre-FEC)
Starts:	01 April 2003	Ends:	30 September 2006	Value (£):	172,156
EPSRC Research Topic Classifications:	Fundamentals of Computing
EPSRC Industrial Sector Classifications:
Related Grants:
Panel History:
Summary on Grant Application Form
The age of the Internet has brought new data management applications and challenges. Data is now accessed over the Web, and is available in a variety of forms including HTML, XML and application-driven formats. To accommodate all types of data, the database research community has introduced the'semi-structured data model', where data is self-describing and irregular. Several practical query languages have been proposed, but their formal foundations and their relationships to logical formalisms are poorly understood, in contrast with the traditional database systems based c the relational model. This proposal focuses on the study of spatial logics for reasoning about semi-structured data, and the application of these logic provide query languages for manipulating such data. We will introduce the'trees with pointers model', a new data structure for representing data on Web. Our model focuses on dangling pointers which we believe occur naturally: for example, a link to a webpage that is currently down. Dangling pointers are used by O'Hearn and Reynolds in their work on pointer arithmetic, but are not emphasised by existing semi-structured data models. V will develop a spatial logic for our model, which allows us to reason locally about disjoint substructures. We will design a query language which integrates well with our model and logic, and compare our approach with existing languages such as XML-QL and XDuce. We will extend our mode to incorporate dynamically-changing structure, as a step towards understanding the dynamic nature of the Web.
Key Findings
This information can now be found on Gateway to Research (GtR) http://gtr.rcuk.ac.uk
Potential use in non-academic contexts
This information can now be found on Gateway to Research (GtR) http://gtr.rcuk.ac.uk
Impacts
Description This information can now be found on Gateway to Research (GtR) http://gtr.rcuk.ac.uk Summary Date Materialised
Sectors submitted by the Researcher
This information can now be found on Gateway to Research (GtR) http://gtr.rcuk.ac.uk
Project URL:
Further Information:
Organisation Website:	http://www.imperial.ac.uk