XPlainer: Explaining XPath within Eclipse

The popularity of XML has motivated the development of novel XML processing tools many of which embed the XPath language for XML querying, transformation, constraint specification, etc. XPath developers (as well as less technical users) have access to commercial tools to help them use the language effectively. Example tools include debuggers that return the result of XPath subexpressions visualized in the context of the input XML document. This paper describes XPlainer-Eclipse, a novel kind of query understanding and debugging tool that provides visual explanations of why XPath expressions return a specific answer. XPlainer-Eclipse combines editors for visualizing both XML documents and XPath expressions as trees together with the explanation of the answers.