Describing and querying hierarchical XML structures defined over the same textual data

Abstract

Our work aims at representing and querying hierarchical XML structures defined over the same textual data. We call such data "multistructured textual documents". Our objectives are twofold. First, we shall define a suited - XML compatible - data model enabling (1) to describe several independent hierarchical structures over the same textual data (represented by several XML structured documents) (2) to consider user annotations added in each structured document. Our proposal is based on the use of hedges (the foundation of the grammar language RelaxNG). Secondly, we shall propose an extension of XQuery in order to query structures and content in a concurrent way. We shall apply our proposals using a literary text written in old french. Copyright 2006 ACM.