Visual Specification and Optimization of XQuery Using VXQ

Ryan H. Choi, Raymond K. Wong, Wei Wang

Abstract: As the popularity of XML increases, the need for querying collections of XML data from various systems becomes imperative. Proposed by W3C, XQuery is becoming a standard for querying such systems. However, the complexity of XQuery prevents its usage by broad audience. This paper proposes a visual XQuery specification language called VXQ to address this issue. By intuitive abstractions of XML and XQuery, the proposed system can generate XQueries for users that have little knowledge about the language. We show that our visual language is more expressive than previous proposals. Finally, we extend our proposed visual XQuery to support query rewriting and optimization for multiple XQuery systems.