To my family
Acknowledgements I would like to thank Dr. John Miller, my advisor and committee chairman, for his guidance, support and advice throughout my research work. The free hand that I was given on this project allowed me to explore new areas and expand my knowledge greatly. I would also like to thank Dr. Don Potter and Dr. Thiab Taha for being on my committee.
I am thankful to Dr. Amit Sheth for providing the required resources in the Large Scale Distributed Information Systems Laboratory (LSDIS). I would also like to thank Dr. Krys Kochut for his help with the QT4XML grammar. Also thanks to Ketan Bhukhanwala for his help on NT and Java, and to Krishnan Parasuraman and Clemens Bertram for their input on XML.
Thanks to my friends at UGA, Karthik Balasubramanian, Ketan Bhukhanwala, Yash Warke, Jorge Cardoso, Balasubramanian Narasimhan, Nandita Bose, Aarthi Narayanan, Himabindu Vuppula, Sneha Kadandale and all the others I met who made my stay in UGA enjoyable. Special thanks to Ragavan Subramanian for his support and for being such a great pal.
My greatest thanks goes to my family, who have borne me with love and patience all the time. A special thanks to my brother for his guidance and support in all matters. Finally, I thank God for having given me the courage to face adversities and the strength to go on tirelessly.