Jérôme Siméon's home page

Jérôme in 1998 Jérôme in 2003...

XQuery 1.0 and XPath 2.0 Galax Implementation of XQuery 1.0 The Essence of XML XQuery from the Experts ICFP'2004

Currently

I am a researcher in Bell Labs, a division of Lucent Technologies.

I am a member of the Network Data and Services Research Department

Formerly

I graduated from French "Grandes Écoles" -- École Polytechnique in 1994 and Supelec in 1996 --, and obtained my Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from Université d'Orsay in 1999. Between 1995 and 1999, I was a member of the Verso Database Group at INRIA.

Research interests

• XML. XML is the W3C standard format for exchanging data and document on the Web. I am interested in building the software infrastructure to develop new XML applications in a simple, efficient and reliable way. To that purpose, I have been doing work on query languages and schema languages for XML.
  
  I represent Lucent Technologies on the W3C XML Query Working Group, which is developing the standard query language (XQuery) and path language (XPath) for XML. I am editor of XQuery 1.0, of XPath 2.0 and of the XQuery 1.0 Formal Semantics. I have also been implementing a prototype implementation of XQuery, which is called Galax. A lot of this work is done in close collaboration with Mary Fernandez, and Phil Wadler.

• XML Storage. XML is becoming widely used as a data exchange format. Now that you create and receive more and more XML data, you certainly need to store it somewhere. The LegoDB project here in Bell Labs can automatically 'shred' your XML data and store it for you in a relational database system. Moreover, LegoDB is doing this in an optimized way. If you tell LegoDB which queries your application will ask, it will find for you the best target relational schema for your application! A lot of this work is done in close collaboration with Juliana Freire, Jayant Haritsa, Maya Ramanath and Prasan Roy.

• Semantic Web. Nobody knows what the Semantic Web is useful for (although the W3C is very Active on it)! But if it is ever to be useful, it needs to be able to describe the semantics of the Web, i.e., of XML. Peter Patel-Schneider and I did some work to find out how to make sure that the Semantics Web and XML work together.

• Data Integration. Data integration is how I got involved with XML in the first place. I used to dream of solving the data integration's world problem. Of course I did not succeed, but I did have fun, and solved a few of the problems on the way. I developed a system called YAT, which had a lot of XML technology in it before XML was even there (including a schema language, a query language and cool optimization techniques).

Talks and Events

• January 2003. Want to learn about The Essence of XML ? Come to POPL'2003, in New Orleans, USA. January 2003.
• June 2002. Why not Building the Semantic Web on XML ? See how at the 1st International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC2002), in Sardinia, Italia. June 2002.
• Early June 2002. StatiX, a new approach to XML statistics at ACM SIGMOD'2002.
• May 22nd, 2002. XQuery in Practice: A Panel Discussion, talk and Galax demonstration at the NEXTWARE Spring 2002 conference, in Baltimore.
• May 9th, 2002. The Yin/Yang Web!, RDF and XML at ACM SIGMOD'2002.
• April 18th, 2002. XML and RDF: Together Again For The First Time!, invited at the computer science research seminar of the New Jersey Institute of Technology.

Publications

• XML Standards
• XML Query Languages
• XML Schema Languages
• XML Storage
• Semantic Web
• Data Integration
• E-Commerce
• Object-Oriented Databases

Program committees

• I am a program vice-chair of the 19th International Conference on Data Engineering, ICDE'2003, which will take place from March 5th to March 8th in Bangalore, India.
• ACM SIGMOD'2002.June 3rd-6th, 2002, in Madison, Wisconsin.
• With Gianni Mecca, I have co-organized and co-chaired the Fourth International Workshop on the Web and Databases (WebDB'2001), in Santa Barbara, on May 24th and 25th 2001, in conjunction with SIGMOD'2001.
• SAINT'2002, The 2002 Symposium on Applications and the Internet, Nara, Japan, January 2002.
• DBPL'2001, 8th International Workshop on Database Programming Languages, Marino, Rome, Italy, September 2001. In conjunction with VLDB'01.
• ICDE'2001, IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering, March 27-30 2001 in Heidelberg, Germany.
• XOT'2000, Workshop on XML and Object Technology, June 12 2000 in Sophia Antipolis, France. Hold in conjunction with ECOOP.

Some older things

• <XML at="Lucent"/> was the first XML event in Lucent! At the time, if you wanted to know more about XML within Lucent, you would look at the Lucent XML Hub (Lucent Internal). Now, you should go to the LuXent's Web page (Lucent Internal).
• The YAT System was a data integration system based on XML.