XML Perspectives on RDF Querying: Towards integrated Access to Data and Metadata on the Web

The integral processing of data and metadata is starting to get recognized as a central challenge for the next decade (e.g. in Pat Selinger’s ICDE 2005 Keynote) not only as part of realizing the Semantic Web vision, but also on a smaller scale as part of the next generation of desktop data management (cf. Apple’s Spotlight and Microsoft’s WinFS). In this article, we focus on metadata represented in the W3C’s RDF formalism. We illustrate first steps towards integrating access to RDF metadata and access to standard Web data in XML format. For this, two XML views over RDF data are expressed in the query language Xcerpt and discussed. These views illustrate two dierent approaches for integrating RDF metadata processing and current data processing techniques.