The VQBD Project

Description: The VQBD ("vee-cubed") project addresses the following problem: What is the best way to explore an XML document of unknown structure and content? We focus on XML documents that are too large to browse in their entirety, even with the assistance of pretty-printing software (e.g., multi-megabyte or larger XML documents). In this context, we use the term data exploration to refer to the process by which a user gathers the information needed to use the data for a specific purpose (e.g., generating a report, writing queries, building user interfaces, writing applications). For details, please refer to the publications section.
An early implementation of some of our ideas is available below as the VQBD system. This implementation uses a zooming user interface for data at different granularities. In addition to the graphical zooming provided by the zooming library, VQBD provides logical zooming, that is, zooming by data summarization. For more details, please refer to the VQBD description below.
An alternate implementation of these ideas, based on a more traditional JTree-like interface, is FuzzyTree. FuzzyTree presents a JTree-like view of an XML file. However, unlike JTree, nodes of the tree are not displayed in simple breadth-first manner. Instead, they are displayed in order of importance, which makes for more intuitive quick viewing of a file. For more details, please refer to the javadoc documentation for FuzzyTree.
We are currently working on a very fast XML viewer, QXV, that can provide interactive response times for XML files that are several hundred megabytes or larger. We hope to have a pulic version available by late May 2002. If you are interested in an early release, please contact us.
People:
- Sudarshan S. Chawathe
- Narendra Kulkarni (QXV)
- Lincong Wang (PDB application)
- Past project members: Donna Malayeri (FuzzyTree) Thomas Baby (VQBD1), Jihwang Yeo (VQBD1)
Download VQBD: The source code (gzipped tar file, 36Kb) for the VQBD system is being released under the terms of the GNU General Public License. VQBD needs some libraries that you can find here (gzipped tar file, 1.6Mb). If you need some sample XML files, you can download this large collection (gzipped tar file, 35Mb).
Download FuzzyTree
Publications:: For a quick overview of VQBD, please refer to the description of our demo at SIGMOD 2001: VQBD: Exploring Semistructured Data (demonstration description). S. Chawathe, T. Baby, J Yeo. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data, page 603, Santa Barbara, California. May 2001. Paper in PDF and PostScript; Citation. (Longer version: PDF; PostScript; Citation.)
Acknowledgements:: This work is supported by the National Science Foundation with grants IIS-9984296 (CAREER) and IIS-0081860 (ITR).