XQuery/IR: Integrating XML Document and Data Retrieval

The structural aspects of the unified XML view are rigid enough to support data retrieval (DR) queries as known from database systems. Over the past few years, increasingly powerful query language, most notably the recent XQuery standard [2], have exploited this fact to provide expressive DR query capabilities for XML. On the other hand, XML’s structural aspects are transparent enough to treat arbitrary parts of the XML-represented data as documents. Document or information retrieval (IR) providing one of the most important capabilities for querying text-rich documents, however, is not supported by XQuery or any of the earlier XML query languages so far.