[Digir-protocol] XPath/XQuery

[Hobern, D. <DH...@gb...>]

Should we take time out at this point to review the present state of
XPath/XQuery to see if they might provide us with a better language for
modeling queries like ours (which after all is the goal of those standards
activities)?  

In the meetings in Brazil Guillaume suggested that we might standardise all
our data storage as XML documents and then rely on XPath pattern matching.
(If this is a misrepresentation, please forgive me.)  I argued that this
might be undesirable in that it may be difficult to turn arbitrary XPath
patterns into SQL statements for arbitrary database schemas and that this
might therefore place an unnecessary technology constraint on provider
implementers. 

However from what I have read of XQuery, it seems to be aiming to become a
plausible standard for addressing our problem and I need to understand it
further.  We certainly do not want to end up with a totally bespoke XML
language for defining queries if a widely accepted standard for doing the
same thing is likely to appear in the near future.

Donald

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Donald Hobern
Programme Officer for Data Access and Database Interoperability
Global Biodiversity Information Facility Secretariat
Zoological Museum - University of Copenhagen
Universitetsparken 15, DK-2100 Copenhagen, Denmark
Tel: +45-35321483 Fax: +45-35321480 E-mail: dh...@gb...
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