Section: Software

Ralyx

Participant : Anne-Marie Vercoustre [ correspondant ] .

In the context of her involvment with the IST department at Inria, Anne-Marie Vercoustre has been leading the Ralyx project . The goal of the Ralyx project is to publish and exploit dynamically the annual INRIA activity reports. Ralyx is based on the Xyleme system, a native XML database. Xyleme stores the XML version of the activity reports and supports queries to the reports involving both their structure and their content. The first objective was to offer a tool for browsing the activity report with the same interface as the legacy HTML version. However, thanks to Xyleme, pages and links are no longer statics, but computed on the fly, which can offer more flexibility in the future (different styles of display, editing and updating along the year, etc). The next step was to design and implement some views that could meet different users' expectations (Research scientists, teams, INRIA departments, INRIA managers, etc). Each view is delivered in HTML but also in XML, and possibly in text for import into Excel; Ralyx will be put in production for the Raweb 2006 (February 2007).

The idea behind Ralyx is to exploit XML documents the same way one can exploit data in a database, i.e. by querying the documents and assembling the answers (parts of the initial documents) into a new document. The approach works well but may be limited by the quality of the initial data. This brings us back to one of AxIS' objectives to control and increase the quality of document-based information systems.

Morever to access fine granularity information embedded into the text we need to use or develop more advanced techniques based on natural language processing.