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XPath/XQuery

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Encyclopedia of Database Systems

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Synonyms

W3C XML path language; W3C XML query language

Definition

XPath (XML path language) and XQuery (XML query language) are query languages defined by the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) for querying XML documents.

XPath is a language based on path expressions that allows the selection of parts of a given XML document. In addition it also allows some minor computations resulting in values such as strings, numbers or booleans. The semantics of the language is based on a representation of the information content of an XML document as an ordered tree. An XPath expression consist usually of a series of steps that each navigate through this tree in a certain direction and select the nodes in that direction that satisfy certain properties.

XQuery is a declarative, statically typed query language for querying collections of XML documents such as the World Wide Web, a file system or a database. It is based on the same interpretation of XML documents as XPath, and includes XPath as a...

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Recommended Reading

  1. Brundage M. XQuery: the XML query language. Reading: Pearson Higher Education/Addison-Wesley; 2004.

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  2. Chamberlin DD, Robie J, Florescu D. Quilt: an XML query language for heterogeneous data sources. In: Proceedings of 3rd International Workshop on the World Wide Web and Databases; 2000. p. 53–62.

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  3. Hidders J, Paredaens J, Vercammen R, Demeyer S. A light but formal introduction to XQuery. In: Proceedings of the Database and XML Technologies, 2nd International XML Database Symposium; 2004. p. 5–20.

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  4. Katz H, Chamberlin D, Kay M, Wadler P, Draper D. XQuery from the experts: a guide to the W3C XML query language. Boston: Addison-Wesley Longman; 2003.

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  5. Melton J, Buxton S. Querying XML: XQuery, XPath, and SQL/XML in context. San Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann; 2006.

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  6. Walmsley P. XQuery. Beijing: O’Reilly Media; 2007.

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  7. W3C. W3C XML query (XQuery). http://www.w3.org/XML/Query/

  8. W3C. XML path language (XPath), version 1.0, W3C recommendation 16 Nov 1999. http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath/. Nov 1999.

  9. W3C. XML path language (XPath) 2.0, W3C recommendation 23 Jan 2007. http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath20/. Jan 2007.

  10. W3C. XQuery 1.0: an XML query language, W3C recommendation 23 Jan 2007. http://www.w3.org/TR/xquery/. Jan 2007.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Antwerp, Antwerpen, Belgium

    Jan Hidders & Jan Paredaens

Authors
  1. Jan Hidders
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  2. Jan Paredaens
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Jan Hidders .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Georgia Institute of Technology College of Computing, Atlanta, GA, USA

    Ling Liu

  2. University of Waterloo School of Computer Science, Waterloo, ON, Canada

    M. Tamer Özsu

Section Editor information

  1. Laboratoire d'Informatique de Grenoble, CNRS and LIG, Grenoble, France

    Sihem Amer-Yahia

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Hidders, J., Paredaens, J. (2018). XPath/XQuery. In: Liu, L., Özsu, M.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-8265-9_774

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