XML Content Management Based on Object-Relational Database Technology

XML (Extensible Markup Language) is a textual markup language designed for the creation of self-describing documents. Such documents contain textual data combined with structural information describing the structure of the textual data. Currently, products and approaches for document-oriented application domains focus mainly on the textual representation when processing and analyzing documents. Usually, they do not take advantage of the availability of structural information and only support some of the relevant aspects of content management. On the other hand, existing research approaches for structure-oriented application domains prefer very fine granularities and give less attention to operations revealing textual document contents. We introduce XCoP (XML Content Repository) as a repository which is based on an object-relational database management system (ORDBMS) and improves content management of XML documents thereby exploiting their structural information. It allows users to reuse and process textual portions of document contents, called fragments, thus avoiding data redundancy and, as a consequence, update anomalies on replicated data. Moreover, it enables collaborative development of documents and facilitates synchronization of fragment modification and versioning. In contrast to the existing tools and approaches, the fragment granularity in XCoP is flexibly configurable. At the same time, XCoP also maintains the structural information of document contents and manages the relations between them.