Jonathan Robie announced the release of five W3C Working Drafts related to XML Query/XQuery work.

Two of the drafts, XQuery: A Query Language for XML and XML Query Use Cases (including solutions in XQuery) are brand new. XQuery attempts to address a broad range of use-cases:

"Because query languages have traditionally been designed for specific kinds of data, most existing proposals for XML query languages are robust for particular types of data sources but weak for other types. This specification describes a new query language called XQuery, which is designed to be broadly applicable across all types of XML data sources."

XML Query Requirements, The XML Query Algebra , and XML Query Data Model have appeared previously.

Robie noted in his message that "XPath and the XML Query Language will be sharing a common expression language." XQuery appears to inherit its approach (and much of its language) from Quilt, which created a patchwork set of facilities based on a number of predecessors.

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• Fatdog XML Query Engine update
• Quilt implementation, XML Update Language
• New Query Requirements, XHTML Forms drafts
• Quilt: a patchwork of languages to query heterogeneous sources