[Israel.pm] Starting XML

[Yona Shlomo]

On Sun, 16 Dec 2007, Jason Elbaum wrote:

> I'm reading a set of files which contain the results of a multiplayer
> team game.

[...]

> My goal is to read the relevant game data and produce statistical
> reports of various types, such as the average points scored on each
> type of event, perhaps broken down by team or location or player or
> time of day or range of dates or game state. I don't know in advance
> what analyses I'll want to run, so I'm looking to develop a general
> infrastructure to support them.

Thinking data-mining: feed your files into an XML database
(e.g., http://exist.sourceforge.net/,
http://www.oracle.com/database/berkeley-db/xml/index.html)
and then use either SQL or XQuery in order to query them.

> In any case, the XML side only involves reading the above file types
> and extracting the data items of interest.

Not necessarily by you. If you use XML databade, you might
only need to define semantics (e.g., schema, relations between names
and types)

> Obviously, I can also do this with a set of regular expressions, but
> it seems wasteful and unreliable.

Regular expressions is a bad bad bad way to process
context-free structures.

-- 
Shlomo Yona
yona at cs.technion.ac.il
http://yeda.cs.technion.ac.il/~yona/