Όνομα Συνεδρίου:4th IC-SCCE, International Conference from Scientific Computing to Computa-tional Engineering
Maritime transport has been the largest carrier of freight throughout recorded history and currently accounts for over 80% of goods transportation. The supporting port infrastructure is of equal importance to ship transport as, especially after 1960’s with the advent of containerization, the existence of specific infrastructure on sea ports and terminals is a prerequisite for a viable and efficient marine transportation. Although there’s an abundance of port terminal information on the world-wide-web, the internet-provided data do not possess the properties required for use in a traditional relational database. XML technology has been proven a good alternative when handling semi-structured data. Additionally, the use of XML supports structure extensibility and web-friendliness; two attributes that permit dynamic updating and wide visibility of the constructed database respectively. In this work an XML web database of world sea ports and terminals is presented, based on the open-source eXist database management system, enriched with functionalities for efficient data retrieval and exploitation.