Bringing database functionality to the WWW

Database Management Systems excel at managing large quantities of data, primarily enterprise data. The WWW is a huge heterogeneous distributed database. To support advanced, robust and reliable applications, such as efficient and powerful querying, groupware ' and electronic commerce, database functionalities need be added to the WWW. A major difficulty is that database techniques were traditionally targeted at a single enterprise environment, providing a centralized control over data and meta-data, statistics for query processing and the ability to utilize monolithic mechanisms for concurrency control, replication and recovery. Previously, we have defined and implemented a query language (W3QL) and a query system for the WWW (W3QS). We dealt with some of the typical problems posed by data management on the WWW: the diversity of data types, the active components (online forms) and the difficulty in defining an adequate data model. In this work we introduce new mechanisms and concepts in order to add database functionalities to the WWW. Namely, a useful abstract model and a blue print of a query language for the WWW, new research directions concerning WWW query processing and the concept of data stability.