Untyped XQuery Canonization

XQuery is a powerful language defined by the W3C to query XML documents. Its query functionalities and its expressiveness satisfy the major needs of both the database community and the text and documents community. As an inconvenient, the grammar used to define XQuery is thus very complex and leads to several equivalent query expressions for one same query. This complexity often discourages XQuery-based software developers and designers and leads to incomplete XQuery handling. Works have been done in [DPX04] and especially in [Che04] to reduce equivalent forms of XQuery expressions into identified ”canonical forms”. However, these works do not cover the whole XQuery specification. We propose in this paper to extend these works in order to canonize the whole untyped XQuery specification.