Extending XQuery with a Pattern Matching Facility

Considering the growing usage of XML for communication and data representation, the need for more advanced analytical capabilities on top of XQuery is emerging. In this regard, a pattern matching facility can be considered as a natural extension to empower XQuery. In this paper we first provide some use cases for XML pattern matching. After showing that current XQuery falls short in meeting basic requirements, we propose an extension to XQuery which imposes no changes into current model, while covering a wide range of important use cases. We also implemented our proposal into the MXQuery prototype and show through experiments that, compared to the existing pattern matching means, our extension is not only more expressive, but also more efficient.