Abstract (EN)

The paper presents a framework for publishing relational databases in textual documents such as mails, HTML pages, LATEX or BibTex files, plain texts, etc. The publication process relies on a mapping of the relational database to a virtual data graph which supports navigation operators. Applications can express the data they need by navigating in the graph. The result is then obtained by producing, during the navigation, textual fragments whose concatenation constitutes the final document. These operations are provided by a declarative query language over virtual graphs, named DOCQL. The actual evaluation of a DOCQL query is done by executing interrelated SQL queries over the relational database. By considering these queries as a whole, a global optimization process takes place during the translation. DOCQL aims at reaching a good tradeoff: allowing a simple, direct and very concise specification of database publishing applications whose semantics depends only on the database instance, while keeping an efficient evaluation. We illustrate its features with the conference management system MYREVIEW.