Integration of Weakly Heterogeneous Semistructured Data

While most business applications typically operate on structured data that can be effectively managed using relational databases, some applications use more complex semistructured data that lacks a stable schema. XML techniques are available for the management of semistructured data, but such techniques tend to be ineffective when applied to large amounts of heterogeneous data, in particular in applications with complex query requirements. We describe an approach that relies on the mapping of multiple semistructured data sets to object-relational structures and uses an object-relational database to support complex query requirements. As an example we use weakly heterogeneous oceanographic data.