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TCDL Bulletin Extended XQuery for Digital LibrariesAlex Dekhtyar, Ionut E. Iacob, Kevin Kiernan, Dorothy C. Porter Documents have, in general, a multihierarchical structure (such as physical organization in the form of pages and lines, content organization in the form of paragraphs and sentences, etc.). Searching multihierarchical XML encoding presents a number of unique challenges for both computer scientists and document experts. We present an extension of the XQuery language suitable for searching multihierarchical XML. Our implementation is part of the Edition Production and Presentation Technology (EPPT) – a complex platform for preparing and presenting electronic editions of documents. This platform includes a data model for multihierarchical document-centric XML, an extensive suite of editing tools, and a query language, Extended XPath, for searching multihierarchical documents. Extended XPath, an extension of the XPath query language, offers us the benefit of clear semantics for path expressions over multihierarchical XML. At the same time, to achieve full query language functionality, path expression languages need to be "wrapped" by a declarative query language, such as XQuery. XQuery is an attractive XML query language for document-centric XML processing as it provides built-in support for presentation of query results. EPPT has HTML presentation capabilities and we have enhanced it with an extended version of XQuery FLWOR expressions over multihierarchical XML documents. More information about EPPT can be found at: <http://www.eppt.org>.
AcknowledgementsThe work of the first author was supported, in part, by the NSF grant ITR-0219924 and the NSF grant ITR-0325063. The work of the second and third authors is supported in part by a Collaborative Research Award from the NEH (RZ-20887-02) and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. © Copyright 2007 Alex Dekhtyar, Ionut E. Iacob, Kevin Kiernan, and Dorothy C. Porter Top | Contents |
