It is well understood that the key for successful Semantic Web applications depends on the availability of machine understandable meta-data. We describe the Information Grid, a practical approach to the Semantic Web, and show a prototype implementation. Information grid resources span all the data in the organization and all the metadata required to make it meaningful. The final goal is to let organizations view their assets in a smooth continuum from the Internet to the Intranet, with uniform semantically rich access.

XML is here as the Internet standard for information exchange among e-businesses and applications. With its dramatic adoption and its ability to model structured, unstructured and semi-structured data, XML has the potential of becoming the data model for Internet data. In recent years, Oracle has evolved its DBMS to support complex, structured, and un-structured data. Oracle has now extended that technology to enable the storage and querying of XML data by evolving its DBMS to an XML enabled DBMS, Oracle8i. We present Oracle's XML-enabling database technology. In particular, we discuss how XML data can be stored, managed and queried in the Oracle8i database.

Over the last few years, Oracle has evolved its flagship relational database system into an Object-Relational system by adding an extensible type system, object storage, an object cache, an extensible query and indexing framework, support for multimedia datatypes, a server-based scalable Java virtual machine, as well as enhancing its SQL DDL and DML language. These extensions were done with the practical goal of bringing objects to mainstream use.