Database systems often use XML schema to describe the format of valid XML documents. Usually, this format is determined when the system is designed. Sometimes, in an already functioning system, a need arises to change the XML schemas. In such a situation, the system has to transform the old XML documents so that they conform to the new format and that as little information as possible is lost in the process. This process is called schema evolution . We have implemented an XML schema transformation toolkit within IBM Master Data Management Server (MDM). MDM uses XML documents to describe products that an enterprise may be offering to its clients. In this work we focus on evolving schemas rather than on integrating separate or heterogeneous data sources. Our solution includes an extendible schema matching algorithm that was designed with evolving XML schemas in mind and takes advantage of hierarchical structure of XML. It also includes a data transformation and migration method appropriate for environments where migration is performed in an abstraction layer above the DBMS. Finally, we describe a novel way of extending an XSLT editor with an XSLT visualization feature to allow the user's input and evaluation of the transformation.

The development of sensors capable of obtaining 3D scans of crime scenes is revolutionizing the ways in which crime scenes can be analyzed and at the same time is driving the need for the development of sophisticated tools to represent and store this data. Here we describe the design of a multimedia database suitable for representing and reasoning about crime scene data. The representation is grounded in the physical environment that makes up the crime scene and provides mechanisms for representing both traditional (forms-based) data as well as 3D scan and other complex spatial data.