Fuzzy Xpath queries in Xquery

Abstract

We have recently designed a fuzzy extension of the XPath language which provides ranked answers to flexible queries taking profit of fuzzy variants of and, or and avg operators for XPath conditions, as well as two structural constraints, called down and deep, for which a certain degree of relevance is associated. In this work, we describe how to implement the proposed fuzzy XPath with the XQuery language. Basically, we have defined an XQuery library able to fuzzily handle XPath expressions in such a way that our proposed fuzzy XPath can be encoded as XQuery expressions. The advantages of our approach is that any XQuery processor can handle a fuzzy version of XPath by using the library we have implemented.