Detailed content

The course consists of five (5) chapters. The first chapter is theoretical. The other four chapters have both a theoretical and a practical dimension. Each dimension will be presented as a series of learning activities. These five (5) chapters are:

This chapter reviews databases, their structure, and their applications. It then presents use cases where database usage can negatively impact system performance and flexibility. These two sections formalize the problem and the question that semi-structured data attempts to address.

This chapter introduces the concepts of Document and Hyperdocument. It also presents document modeling and document classes. In this context, a document is a physical organization of data (in free form, list, tree, or forest), while the document class defines the conceptual aspect of the document (report, letter, article, book, etc.). These documents are an essential element for data exchange on the web; they thus constitute an ideal use case for the application of semi-structured data.

The goal of this unit is to introduce students to all the technologies related to XML. This chapter focuses particularly on the DOM and the XPath language. The DOM model allows a document to be represented as a tree of nodes. This representation allows users to traverse the document to extract data. It also facilitates modification by inserting nodes in the desired positions. The XML ecosystem also offers SAX, another method for traversing the XML document without explicitly using the DOM model.