Comparative analysis of five XML query languages

1998

XML is a new standard that supports data exchange on the World-Wide Web. It is likely to become as important and as widely used as HTML.

Web Information Systems and Technologies, 2006

We have observed an increase in document search needs in organizations. This increase in document search demand has required better efficiency on search software languages. The current technologies are using specific patterns to search documents. The most usual pattern, called XML, has been proposed by W3C and some languages (e.g. XQL, XML-QL etc.) were created to recover XML documents. The implementation of a XML query server, which abstracts the language used, has been an emerging necessity. This paper surveys technology used to develop a XML query server, called XQOM Schema, from the modelling to the implementation. In an organization setting, we have adopted new abstraction forms of searching for XML documents without the usage limitation established by a specific language. XQOM Schema may contribute to the creation of an universal document searching pattern in XML format.

Abstract. In this paper, we present the general framework of the XML information retrieval on Web, with a special lookout to the XQuery language–proposed recommendation of the World-Wide Web Consortium. Also, we focus on the different possible techniques for querying the multimedia information annotated in SMIL. Keywords: query languages, XML documents, multimedia retrieval.

This paper identi es essential features of an XML query language by examining four existing query languages: XML-QL, YAT L , Lorel, and XQL. The rst three languages come from the database community and possess striking similarities. The fourth comes from the document community and lacks some key functionality of the other three.

International Journal of Web Engineering and Technology, 2013

The study presented in this paper is a controlled experiment, aiming at investigating the understandability and correctness in two query languages, namely KINISIS against XQuery. XQuery is the W3C standard query language for XML documents. KINISIS is a graphical query language which is designed and implemented upon XQuery, using metaphors extracted from the European Road Traffic Act. We conducted a controlled experiment in order to assess users' performance, with respect to understanding and correctness, in developing queries in KINISIS and in XQuery. The findings, from the collected and statistically analysed data, showed that users performing on KINISIS had significantly better results comparing to those using XQuery. As an output of this study, is that a graphical XQuery language that is based on successful metaphors is more appropriate for novice users in XQuery technology, instead of textual XQuery.

ACM SIGMOD Record, 2004

The EDBT'04 Workshop on D ā tabase T echnologies for Hā ndling X ML Information on the Web (DataX'04 ) was held in Heraklion, Crete, on Sunday 14 March, 2004, and attracted approximately 30 participants from di¤erent countries.

2005

Abstract The spreading of XML data in many contexts of modern computing infrastructures and systems causes a pressing need for adequate XML querying capabilities; to address this need, the W3C is proposing XQuery as the standard query language for XML, with a language paradigm and a syntactic flavor comparable to the SQL relational language. XQuery is designed for meeting the requirements of skilled database programmers; its inherent complexity makes the new language unsuited to unskilled users.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2003

Most query and transformation languages developed since the mid 90es for XML and semistructured data-e.g. XQuery [1], the precursors of XQuery [2], and XSLT [3]-build upon a path-oriented node selection: A node in a data item is specified in terms of a root-to-node path in the manner of the file selection languages of operating systems. Constructs inspired from the regular expression constructs * , +, ?, and "wildcards" give rise to a flexible node retrieval from incompletely specified data items. This paper further introduces into Xcerpt, a query and transformation language further developing an alternative approach to querying XML and semistructured data first introduced with the language UnQL [4]. A metaphor for this approach views queries as patterns, answers as data items matching the queries. Formally, an answer to a query is defined as a simulation [5] of an instance of the query in a data item.

2000

The World Wide Web promises to transform human society by making virtually all types of information instantly available everywhere. Two prerequisites for this promise to be realized are a universal markup language and a universal query language. The power and flexibility of XML make it the leading candidate for a universal markup language. XML provides a way to label information from diverse data sources including structured and semi-structured documents, relational databases, and object repositories. Several XML-based query languages have been proposed, each oriented toward a specific category of information. Quilt is a new proposal that attempts to unify concepts from several of these query languages, resulting in a new language that exploits the full versatility of XML. The name Quilt suggests both the way in which features from several languages were assembled to make a new query language, and the way in which Quilt queries can combine information from diverse data sources into a query result with a new structure of its own.

While we can take as a fact " the Web changes everything " , we argue that " XML is the means " for such a change to make a significant step forward. We therefore regard XML-related research as the most promising and challenging direction for the community of database researchers. In this paper, we approach XML-related research by taking three progressive perspectives. We first consider XML as a data representation standard (in the small), then as a data interchange standard (in the large), and finally as a basis for building a new repository technology. After a broad and necessarily coarse-grain analysis, we turn our focus to three specific research projects which are currently ongoing at the Po-litecnico di Milano, concerned with XML query languages, with active document management, and with XML-based specifications of Web sites.