From isilval@us.ibm.com Thu Aug 31 17:25:14 2000 Return-Path: Received: from e1.ny.us.ibm.com (e1.ny.us.ibm.com [32.97.182.101]) by amber.ccs.neu.edu (8.10.0.Beta10/8.10.0.Beta10) with ESMTP id e7VLP8L03370; Thu, 31 Aug 2000 17:25:08 -0400 (EDT) Received: from northrelay02.pok.ibm.com (northrelay02.pok.ibm.com [9.117.200.22]) by e1.ny.us.ibm.com (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id RAA72622; Thu, 31 Aug 2000 17:24:51 -0400 From: isilval@us.ibm.com Received: from d01ml233.pok.ibm.com (d01ml233.pok.ibm.com [9.117.200.63]) by northrelay02.pok.ibm.com (8.8.8m3/NCO v4.93) with ESMTP id RAA83286; Thu, 31 Aug 2000 17:25:00 -0400 Importance: Normal Subject: Re: Your theses and XML To: Karl Lieberherr Cc: pbergstein@umassd.edu, IHolland@kronos.com, JohnXiao@aol.com, Walter.Huersch@zuehlke.com, dem@ccs.neu.edu, lopes@parc.xerox.com, lseiter@scu.edu X-Mailer: Lotus Notes Release 5.0.3 (Intl) 21 March 2000 Message-ID: Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2000 17:24:59 -0400 X-MIMETrack: Serialize by Router on D01ML233/01/M/IBM(Build V505_08282000 |August 28, 2000) at 08/31/2000 05:25:00 PM MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Status: R Content-Length: 4362 Yes, I definitely think there is a parallel with the CDG learning work in this paper. In fact the whole world of XML, DOM, XMI (XML Metadata Interchange) and MOF (OMG's Meta Object Facility) have direct parallels with the ideas in Demeter that we have worked on. Can we claim our work as prior art in the patent you refer to? -- Nacho Ignacio Silva-Lepe IBM T. J. Watson Research Center P.O. Box 704 Yorktown Heights, NY 10598, USA INTERNET: isilval@us.ibm.com WWW: http://www.zgnews.com/silva Phone: (914) 784 7003 Fax: (914) 784 6040 Karl Lieberherr on 08/31/2000 03:04:22 PM To: Ignacio Silva-Lepe/Watson/IBM@IBMUS, pbergstein@umassd.edu cc: IHolland@kronos.com, JohnXiao@aol.com, Walter.Huersch@zuehlke.com, dem@ccs.neu.edu, lopes@parc.xerox.com, lseiter@scu.edu Subject: Your theses and XML Dear Paul and Nacho: I am following the use of some of our Demeter ideas in new technologies and have a little page on this at: http://www.ccs.neu.edu/research/demeter/technology-transfer/in-main-stream.html I noticed some interesting developments in the domain of your thesis. Take a look at: http://www.ccs.neu.edu/research/demeter/related-work/schema-learning/gionis.pdf This is a SIGMOD 2000 paper from Bell Labs and Stanford. I heard that they applied for a US patent. This paper picks up the issue of deriving a class graph from object descriptions. The new terminology is: object description -> XML document class graph -> XML schema or document type definition (DTD) The SIGMOD 2000 authors describe a system XTRACT that derives a DTD from XML documents. There is one significant distinction between object descriptions and XML documents: object descriptions give names to the parts while XML documents do not. But that might actually change as new XML schema notations come along. The Bell Labs/Stanford team explores similar issues as you do: finding an appropriate generalization from the "examples", minimizing the schema (they also have an NP-completeness result as you do). They use other techniques than you do (because they don't have the part names). It would be good if you could write a few paragraphs that compare your PhD thesis work with the new SIGMOD 2000 work. It seems that your work is ahead of the SIGMOD 2000 work because you also deal with incremental learning. Please compare the new paper with your works below. A similar situation has also appeared with other theses. It is important that we send a letter to Bell Labs and Stanford telling them that they missed some important related work that explored their theme about 10 years ago. Please let me know if your schedule is so busy that you don't have time to look into this. Best regards, -- Karl @ARTICLE{lieber-nacho-pberg:se-p, AUTHOR = "Karl J. Lieberherr and Paul Bergstein and Ignacio {Silva-Lepe}", TITLE = "From objects to classes: Algorithms for object-oriented design", JOURNAL = "Software Engineering Journal", YEAR = "1991", MONTH = "July", VOLUME = 6, NUMBER = 4, PAGES = "205-228" } @INPROCEEDINGS{lieber-nacho-pberg:conf, AUTHOR = "Karl J. Lieberherr and Paul Bergstein and Ignacio {Silva-Lepe}", TITLE = "Abstraction of Object-Oriented Data Models", BOOKTITLE = er, YEAR = "1990", ADDRESS = "Lausanne, Switzerland", PAGES = "81-94", EDITOR = "Hannu Kangassalo", PUBLISHER = "Elsevier" } @INPROCEEDINGS{pberg-lieber:ecoop, AUTHOR = "Paul Bergstein and Karl Lieberherr", TITLE = "Incremental Class Dictionary Learning and Optimization", BOOKTITLE = ecoop, YEAR = "1991", ADDRESS = "Geneva, Switzerland", PAGES = "377-396", PUBLISHER = "Springer Verlag Lecture Notes 512" } @PHDTHESIS{paul:thesis, AUTHOR = "Paul Bergstein", TITLE = "{Managing the Evolution of Object-Oriented Systems}", SCHOOL = "Northeastern University", YEAR = 1994, NOTE = "151 pages" } @PHDTHESIS{nacho:thesis, AUTHOR = "Ignacio {Silva-Lepe}", TITLE = "Techniques for Reverse-engineering and Re-engineering into the Object-Oriented Paradigm", SCHOOL = "Northeastern University", YEAR = "1994", NOTE = "133 pages" } @InProceedings{Bergstein91, author = "Paul Bergstein", title = "Object-Preserving Class Transformations", booktitle = "Proc. OOPSLA'91, {ACM} SIGPLAN Sixth Annual Conference on Object-Oriented Programming Systems, Languages and Applications", pages = "299--313", year = 1991}