A query language for XML

An important application of XML is the interchange of electronic data (EDI) between multiple data sources on the Web. As XML data proliferates on the Web, applications will need to integrate and aggregate data from multiple s ource and clean and transform data to facilitate exchange. Data extraction, conversion, transformation, and integration are all well-understood databa se problems, and their solutions rely on a query language. We present a que ry language for XML, called XML-QL, which we argue is suitable for performi ng the above tasks. XML-QL is a declarative, 'relational complete' query la nguage and is simple enough that it can be optimized. XML-QL can extract da ta from existing XML documents and construct new XML documents. (C) 1999 Pu blished by Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.