XML content warehousing: Improving sociological studies of mailing lists and web data

TL;DR

This paper introduces an XML-based data warehousing approach for sociological analysis of web data like mailing lists, enabling flexible, comprehensive, and evolvable data storage and analysis.

Contribution

It proposes an XML schema for mailing list data warehousing, demonstrating its advantages over traditional methods and providing a practical implementation and case study.

Findings

XML warehousing supports structural evolution and complex queries.

It simplifies handling hidden or complex data sources.

Exporting to sociological analysis software is feasible.

Abstract

In this paper, we present the guidelines for an XML-based approach for the sociological study of Web data such as the analysis of mailing lists or databases available online. The use of an XML warehouse is a flexible solution for storing and processing this kind of data. We propose an implemented solution and show possible applications with our case study of profiles of experts involved in W3C standard-setting activity. We illustrate the sociological use of semi-structured databases by presenting our XML Schema for mailing-list warehousing. An XML Schema allows many adjunctions or crossings of data sources, without modifying existing data sets, while allowing possible structural evolution. We also show that the existence of hidden data implies increased complexity for traditional SQL users. XML content warehousing allows altogether exhaustive warehousing and recursive queries through contents, with far less dependence on the initial storage. We finally present the possibility of exporting the data stored in the warehouse to commonly-used advanced software devoted to sociological analysis.