[$LIST] Mary Fernandez's talk tomorrow

[Susan Horwitz <horwitz@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

This is a reminder that Mary will give a talk tomorrow.


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4:00pm, Oct 21, Thursday, 2310CS

Mary Fernandez
AT&T Labs-Research

Growing XQuery: Memoirs of a W3C Standards Hacker

XML is a flexible data format that has rapidly become the lingua
franca of data exchange between inter-enterprise applications on the
Internet. Hundreds of industry-specific XML dialects already
exist. Bioinformatics data, financial products, legal documents,
medical transcripts, and electronic-commerce transactions are some
examples of the diverse kinds of data that are exchanged in XML.

For the past four years, I have been a member of the World-Wide Web
Consortium's XML Query Language working group, whose charter is
todefine XQuery, a standard query language for XML. In this talk, I
will identify the characteristics of XML and the requirements of
data-exchange applications that demand a new query language. I will
describe how XQuery, a functional, strongly-typed query language,
satisfies (most of) those requirements.

A cast of thousands contribute to XQuery.  I work most closely with
Jrme Simon (IBM Watson Research). Together, we have built
Galax(http://www.galaxquery.org), a complete implementation of XQuery
1.0, which I can  demonstrate after the talk.


Bio:
Mary Fernndez is Principal Technical Staff at AT&T Labs -
Research. Her research interests include data integration, Web-site
implementation and management, domain-specific languages, and
their interactions.  She is a member of the W3C XML Query Language
Working Group, co-editor of several of the XQuery W3C working drafts,
and is a principal designer and implementor of Galax, a complete,
open-source implementation of XQuery.  Mary is also an associate editor
of ACM Transactions on Database Systems and serves on the advisory
board of MentorNet (www.mentornet.net), an e-mentoring network for
women in engineering and science.