[Coin-standards] INFORMS / directions

[richard_damian at peoplesoft.com]

I got a copy of your note from a colleague.  We work in an Optimization
group that is facing the problem of storing mathematical expressions in a
database.  On the front end, I have a parser that converts our
representation to XML and then to MathML for display in a browser.  But on
the back end, we need to be able to store and retrieve math expressions
from a database to run a linear model.

I have been thinking for some time about using XML capabilities of most
modern databases to store our expressions as XML.  In that way we would not
need to worry so much about a potentially complex database schema needed
for storage of the tree.  We could depend on the QPath capabilities of SQL
to traverse our data and regenerate our expression.

Do you have an experience in this area?

Dick Damian
Optimization Technology
PeopleSoft