While most of the data published on the Web is either semi-structured (e.g., HTML documents) or unstructured (e.g., text files, images), the Web also offers "hooks" to access non-Web centric structured data (e.g., relational databases). CGI scripts are usually used to access back-end databases. The Web has so far been incongruous with databases. The reason that the Web is database unfriendly is that it has been developed for open data sources. Databases are closed in nature in that communication with them is through a rigid protocol (DBMS). One needs to know the schema of a database to access or modify its state. This is fundamentally different from the openness and freeform type of Web data. Web protocols and search engines have been developed for this kind of requirements and environments. Therefore, it is important to note that information retrieval and search techniques could not be applied because of the different nature of, and the fundamental assumptions about the data. However, we could not discount the fact that the Web has made it now possible to have one single interface to potentially access all Internet accessible databases. The challenge now is to make the Web database friendly. This essentially mean that we need to build an adequate infrastructure on top of the Web that will provide for a World Wide Database (WWD).
展开▼
