Monday, I attended a colloquium given by Phil Bohannon on The ROLEX Project. The thing is a C++ library which provides DOM access on one side, and interfaces with an in-memory relational database on the other, and does lazy swiveling, and heuristic query planning. I went and read the papers published by the project before the colloquium, and I was somewhat impressed by the idea. However, I think that working instead on efficient XML databases would have been a better use of the time.