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January 26, 2007 | Comments: (0)

W3C sets XML standards

TAGS: Data Management

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) this week announced it has published eight standards in its XML family to support the ability to query and transform XML data and documents.

Primary specifications include XQuery 1.0: An XML query language; Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations (XSLT) 2.0 and XML Path Language (XPath) 2.0.

The new standards will play a role in enterprise computing by connecting databases with the Web, W3C said. XQuery provides for data mining while XSLT 2.0 boosts functionality in XSLT, which enables transformation and styled presentation of XML documents. These two specifications are dependent on XPath 2.0.

XPath 2.0 is an expression language allowing processing of values conformining to the data model defined in XQuery/XPath Data Model (XDM). The model provides a tree representation of XML documents and atomic values such as integers and strings. Version 2.0 supports a richer set of data types than the 1.0 version.

"XQuery will serve as a unifying interface for access to XML data, much as SQL has done for relational data," said Don Chamberlin of IBM Almaden Research Center, co-inventor of the original SQL query language and a co-editor of XQuery 1.0, in a statement released by W3C.

In addition to the primary specifications published this week, others include:

* XML Syntax for XQuery 1.0 (XQueryX).
* XDM.
* XQuery 1.0 and XPath 2.0 Functions and Operators.
* XQuery 1.0 and XPath 2.0 Formal Semantics.
* XSLT 2.0 and XQuery 1.0 Serialization.

Posted by Paul Krill on January 26, 2007 09:41 AM

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