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Feature

Database XML

Storing RDF/XML in a relational database

Issue: 3.2 (November/December 2004)
Author: Mark Choate
Author Bio: Mark Choate is an author and consultant residing in Raleigh, North Carolina.
Article Description: No description available.
Article Length (in bytes): 35,208
Starting Page Number: 20
RBD Number: 3211
Resource File(s):

3211.sit Updated: Friday, November 19, 2004 at 9:19 AM

Related Web Link(s):

http://oscom.org
http://prismstandard.org
http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/creator

Known Limitations: None

Excerpt of article text...

I recently developed an RDF schema editor written in REALbasic with the Valentina database, which is available as a plugin for REALbasic. If you are not familiar with RDF, it is an XML specification adopted by the Semantic Web activity group of the W3 Consortium which I will explain in more detail a little later on. Since RDF is XML, and storing XML in a relational database creates some interesting challenges, particularly in the area of validation, this article will review a database table wrapper class I developed to overcome the problems I encountered. While the class was originally developed to store XML data in a Valentina database, it can be useful for other projects as well, especially those with difficult data validation requirements. For the purposes of this article, I modified the code so that it can be used with both Valentina and REALdatabase and use examples intended for use with REALdatabase throughout the article.
Before examining the class in detail, I need to provide some background information on the kind of validation that was required by RDF. With the release of REALbasic 5.5, REALbasic's REALdatabase is available to everyone, not just owners of the professional edition. Since databases with REALbasic may be new to many of you, I'll step through the process of creating one of the tables using REALdatabase and RB's powerful control-binding abilities. I'll also show how to create the table in Valentina, while discussing the relative strengths of both tools.

...End of Excerpt. Please purchase the magazine to read the full article.