Technical Status Report - 97Q1 Ian Davis University of Waterloo Progress Report In the period April 1st - June 30 1996 our primary focus was on implementation of a public World Wide Web Beta trial, which will showcase our HQP, and enhancing our HQP in order to effectively support such a trial. Achievements We have in the past quarter obtained public domain copies of the Bible, the Complete Works of Shakespeare, and the Devils dictionary, and have added appropriate markup to these documents, which allows them to serve as interesting components of our Beta Trial (720). We have also begun the process of adding appropriate markup to the University of Waterloo Calendar (515), as part of a second in-house Beta Trial, which may eventually form part of our public World Wide Web demonstration (820). We have developed the HTML pages which form the superstructure of our World Wide Web demonstration. This superstructure provides access to introductory and motivational material, explanations, a tutorial explaining our text extensions, interactive examples of how our HQP might be used, etc (523). We have enhanced the public domain Sun RPC source code so that it is capable of supporting light weight threaded clients and servers, and have used these enhancements to allow our HQP and subordinate agents to service multiple incoming WWW requests effectively simultaneously (330,340). We have enhanced our software so that the SQL plans, computed by our HQP and subordinate agents, can be transmitted across internal interfaces, and subsequently be presented to interested clients on demand (353). This information allows better understanding of the methodology used within our HQP for resolving SQL queries, and emphasizes the distributed nature of our data sources. We have enhanced the functionality of our prototype software. The '&' operation is (subject to some outstanding restrictions) now supported when matching and extracting text, and our CGI interfaces are now more powerful (330,340,353). We have begun the exercise of volume testing our HQP using the TPCD benchmark (710). This exercise involves examining the behaviour and performance of our HQP when retrieving large volumes of relational data from Oracle, from Pat, and from both, using the provided TPCD sample queries. Preliminary work in this area has already resulted in significant improvements in how queries are optimised by our HQP and the underlying agents. We remained actively involved in the SQL/MM standards work (140,170). We acted as host for the SQL/MM SC21 Canadian Advisor Committee meeting, on April 23-24th, and attended the ISO SQL/MM Rapporteur Group meeting in Kansas City, Missouri, between May 21-23rd. Problem review We continue to search for interesting relational data which is strongly related to available structured text data. Without such data it will be difficult to demonstrate effectively our ability to integrate text and relational data. While our software is now capable of using multiple threads, the underlying locking used within the threads package provided with OSF 2.0 is flawed. We have asked for OSF 3.2 to be installed on our OSF alpha, at which time this problem should be resolved. Until then we are forced to single thread the software used in our demonstrations. Currently our beta trial demonstration is changing constantly. We have requested that a second http port be established on our development machine, so that we could support a live beta trial, while continuing to enhance a development beta trial. We encountered no significant problems impacting on our progress during the last quarter. Coming events plan Weekly meetings of the research group within the University will continue throughout the next period. We will be involved in a teleconference on July 5th, involving all members of CSSC, to demonstrate the current status of our collective WWW Beta trial. Project Status 110 Model Requirements [A] 94May01 94Sep30 100% 110 Model Requirements [B] 94Oct01 95Jan30 100% 120 DDL Design [A] 94Jan01 94Dec30 100% 120 DDL Design [B] 95Feb01 95Feb30 100% 120 DDL Design [C] 95Mar01 94Mar30 100% 131 DDL Interface Validator [A] 94Oct01 95Jan30 100% 131 DDL Interface Validator [B] 95Feb01 95Mar30 100% 140 DDL Specification [A] 95Jul01 95Dec30 100% 140 DDL Specification [B] 96Dec01 96Jun30 100% 150 DML Design [A] 94Jan01 94Jun30 100% 150 DML Design [B] 94Jul01 94Sep30 100% 150 DML Design [C] 94Oct01 95Jan30 100% 161 DML Interface Validator 95Jan01 95Jun30 100% 170 DML Specification [A] 95Jul01 95Dec30 100% 170 DML Specification [B] 96Jan01 96Jun30 100% 180 API Design 95Jan01 95Dec30 100% 190 API Specification 96Jan01 96Jun30 100% 310 HQP Requirements [A] 94Oct01 95Jan01 100% 310 HQP Requirements [B] 95Jan01 95Mar30 100% 320 HQP Design [A] 94Jan01 94Dec30 100% 320 HQP Design [B] 95Jan01 95Mar30 100% 331 HQP Prototype [A] 94Jan01 94Jun30 100% 331 HQP Prototype [B] 94Jan01 95Jun30 100% 331 HQP Prototype [C] 95Jul01 96Jan31 100% 331 HQP Prototype [D] 96Feb01 96Jun30 90% 341 Agent/Oracle Integration 95Apr01 95Sep30 100% 341 Agent/DB2 Integration 95Apr01 95Sep30 100% 341 Agent/Fulcrum Integration 95Oct01 96Jun30 100% 341 Agent/Pat Integration 95Oct01 96Jun30 90% 515 WWW applications for Beta Trial 96Apr01 96Jul01 75% 523 Web Site CGI Gateway to HQP 95Sep30 96Sep30 95% 700 Testing 95Oct01 96Sep30 50% 800 Beta Trial 96Sep30 97Mar31 0% 900 Project Coordination 93Apr01 97Mar31 75% Ian Davis. July 4, 1996