Stefano Zacchiroli and Paolo Marinelli of the Università di Bologna are the winners of the 2006 XML Scholarship: they will present their paper, Co-Constraint Validation in a Streaming Context, during the plenary session at 9:00 am on Thursday 7 December at the XML 2006 conference in Boston. Special thanks to our judges, Dr. Michael Sperberg-McQueen, Dr. Henry Thompson, and Dr. Mary Fernandez, for their hard work.

Why it matters

(Note: this is my opinion, not the judges’.) Compared to using DOM or XSLT trees, streaming XML (as the SAX API does) is very efficient for both time and — especially — memory usage. However, some problems are very difficult to solve without random access to an XML document. One of the best-known examples is validation using co-constraints, where one part of a document is or is not valid based on something in another part of the document, such as an attribute value or another element (possibly a part that came before, in a long-discarded part of the stream). As XML moves from its traditional territory of single-source publishing, some projects will need to be able to validate and process it very fast, at near-network speeds, and a way to validate co-constraints using something like SAX or StAX will be the key — I’m looking forward to hearing Paolo and Stefano share their ideas in Boston.