This is a tool to parse dblp.xml (http://dblp.uni-trier.de/xml/) and store inproceedings into MySQL database.

To be specific, four key information, namely author, conference, paper, and citation under <inproceedings> will be extracted and stored in MySQL database as four tables. Please see dblp.sql for the database schema.

The initial code was written by me in early 2010 for my undergraduate thesis. With some modifications, I released the code in Google Code on September 2013, and later migrated it to GitHub. I am still actively maintaining the code, e.g., fixing bugs as well as trying to implement new features. Therefore, please do contact me if you have any questions or suggestions. Thanks!

1. Download dblp.xml and dblp.dtd from http://dblp.uni-trier.de/xml/, and save them at the same folder.

2. Restore the database with MySQL dump file (dblp.sql)

 Suppose you have already installed MySQL database (5.5 or later).  You may first log to your MySQL and then use "source" command to restore the database:

mysql>> source path_of_dblp.sql

If everything goes well, a database named dblp with four tables (i.e., author, citation, conference, paper) has be created.

3. Configure database connection

Please change dbUrl, user, password in db/DBConnection.java according to your own database setting.

4. Run the parser

• Using Eclipse

  You need to add mysql-connector-java-6.0-bin.jar to project build path. See this post on how to do this.

  And then run Parser.java with

  • program argument: the path of dblp.xml
  • VM arguemnts: -Xmx1G -DentityExpansionLimit=2500000

  See this post if you are not sure how to specify arguments in Eclipse.

• Using command line

  Similarly, you need to add mysql-connector-java-6.0-bin.jar to the classpath, and set program and VM arguments. The command will be something like:

   mkdir bin
   javac -cp lib/mysql-connector-java-6.0-bin.jar -d bin src/db/DBConnection.java src/xml/* 
   java -cp lib/mysql-connector-java-6.0-bin.jar:bin -DentityExpansionLimit=2500000 xml.Parser [path_of_dblp.xml]

All done! The program will run for a while. It takes 885 seconds to parse dblp-2016.xml on my latptop.

• Out of memory error

  If the program raises this error, please increase the memeory allocation to this program by specifying JVM argument -Xmx[memory size] (e.g., -Xmx1G).

• Too small entity limit error

  The parser has encountered more than "64,000" entity expansions in this document; this is the limit imposed by the application

  Please specify another JVM argument -DentityExpansionLimit=2500000

• Encoding error in inserting title to MySQL

  Incorrect string value: '\xF0\x9D\x94\xB94i...' for column 'title' at row 1

  Cause: MySQL's utf8 permits only the Unicode characters that can be represented with 3 bytes in UTF-8. However, some titles have characters that needs 4 bytes.

 Solution: Use utf8mb4 (supported by MySQL 5.5 and later) instead of utf8 for dblp tables. I have fixed this in dblp.sql.

The code has been tested with four versions of dblp.xml, namely dblp-2002, dblp-2013, dblp-2014, dblp-2015, dblp-2016 (released on 2016-11-29) under JDK 1.8. It should also work well with older JDK (e.g., 1.7)  

To know more about the xml structure of dblp, you may read:

• My previous article posted in CSDN blog (in Chinese)

  http://blog.csdn.net/kite1988/article/details/5186628

• DBLP — Some Lessons Learned, authored by Michael Ley

  http://dblp.uni-trier.de/xml/docu/dblpxml.pdf

• DBLP XML DTD

  http://dblp.uni-trier.de/xml/dblp.dtd