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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...
Recommended Reading
Brundage M. XQuery: the XML query language. Reading: Pearson Higher Education/Addison-Wesley; 2004.
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.
Hidders J, Paredaens J, Vercammen R, Demeyer S. A light but formal introduction to XQuery. In: Database and XML technologies, 2nd international XML database symposium. Toronto. 2004. p. 5–20.
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.
Melton J, Buxton S. Querying XML: XQuery, XPath, and SQL/XML in context. San Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann; 2006.
Walmsley P. XQuery. Beijing: O’Reilly Media; 2007.
W3C. W3C XML query (XQuery). http://www.w3.org/XML/Query/
W3C. XML path language (XPath), version 1.0, W3C recommendation 16 Nov 1999. http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath/. Nov 1999.
W3C. XML path language (XPath) 2.0, W3C recommendation 23 Jan 2007. http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath20/. Jan 2007.
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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Hidders, J., Paredaens, J. (2016). XPath/XQuery. In: Liu, L., Özsu, M. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-7993-3_774-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-7993-3_774-2
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