One of the main aims of Component adaptation [Szy97] is to help application developers reuse components so that they can plug-in third party components into their application. This research concentrates on this type of adaptation but in the context of Web Services. Web Services are becoming increasingly popular. Web Services often fit the requirements of being a component, and can be reused in a very similar manner. Hence there is a requirement for adaptation of Web Services just as there is the need for adaptation of software components. There are now quite a few adaptation techniques, but few of them have identified adaptation techniques for Web Services. This approach to adaptation allows for the modification of data and behaviour of existing Web Services. The approach to adaptation uses eXtensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) transformation applied to the message passed between Web Services. These messages are commonly in XML format, hence XSL can be used to modify them. The application of the transformation is guided by a specification written in XML. The adaptation is executed by a generic runtime system that uses these specifications which are referred to as Guiding Specifications. This has been demonstrated by way of a motivating real world example implemented on the .Net platform. It is shown how an adapter can be specified using a simplistic Guiding Specification and related XSLT documents. This allows the implementation to work more efficiently than hand coding each adapter. It is the underlying generic runtime support that provides much of this benefit. Component based software engineering (CBSE) constructs applications by assembling components together, CBSE has been of great help to application developers due to the very fact that tailor made components can be purchased from third party vendors and can be plugged-in to a system to form a working application. But in practice 'as-is' reuse is very unlikely to occur, and most components need to be changed in some way to match the requirements of the application architecture and other components. The process of changing thecomponent for use in a particular application is often referred to as Component Adaptation.

Most information retrieval (IR) systems respond to users' representation of their information needs (queries) with a ranked list of relevant results, usually text documents. XML documents di er from traditional text documents by explicitly separating structure and content. XML-IR systems aim to exploit this separation by searching and retrieving relevant components of documents (called elements) rather than entire documents thereby, better ful lling users' information needs. Despite the potential bene t of XML-IR systems, most research in this area has not been centered on the needs of users. In particular, current XML-IR query formation interfaces, namely keywords-only and formal language, are not able to optimally address the needs of users. Keywords-only interfaces are too unsophisticated to fully capture the users' complex information needs that contain both content and structural requirements. In contrast, while formal languages are able to capture users' content and structural requirements they are too di cult to use, even for experts, and are too closely tied to the physical structure of the collection. This thesis presents a solution to these problems by presenting NLPX, a natural language interface for XML-IR systems. NLPX allows users to enter XML-IR queries in natural language and translates them into a formal language (NEXI) to be processed by existing XML retrieval systems. When evaluated by system testing, NLPX outperformed alternative translation approaches. When tested in a user-based experiment, NLPX performed comparably to a query-by-template interface, the baseline user-oriented interface for formulating structured queries. It is hoped that the outcomes of this thesis will help to refocus the eld of XML-IR around the user. This will lead to the development of more useful XML-IR systems, which will hopefully result in the more widespread use of XML-IR systems.

In this thesis, we address several fundamental concerns of maintaining and querying huge ordered label trees. We focus on practical implementation issues of storing, updating and query optimization of XML database management system. Specifically, we address the XML order maintenance problem, efficient evaluation of structural join, intrinsic skew handling of join, succinct storage of XML data and update synchronization of mobile XML data.

Proefschrift Universiteit van Amsterdam. / Met lit.opg. en samenvatting in het Nederlands.

Thesis (M.S.)--Ohio University, June, 2001. / Title from PDF t.p.

Univ., Diss.--Lübeck, 2005. / Literaturverz. S. [165] - 175.

Thesis (M.S.)--Rochester Institute of Technology, 2008. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (p. 132-135).

Thesis (M.App.Sc.) - Carleton University, 2003. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 137-144). Also available in electronic format on the Internet.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Carleton University, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 215-231). Also available in electronic format on the Internet.

Thesis (M.C.S.)--Carleton University, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 97-100). Also available in electronic format on the Internet.