TNTBase – a Versioned XML Database

A huge amount of documents is created and changed in our everyday life, so that Version Control Systems like Git or SVN are tightly integrated with documents workflows. On the other hand, XML has come of age as a basis for document formats, and even though XML as a textbased format is suitable for version control in principle, the fact that version control systems work on files makes the integration of fragment access techniques like XPath or XQuery difficult. In this paper, we present the state of the art of TNTBase, a versioned XML database based on Berkeley DB XML and Subversion. Thus, the system integrates versioning and fragment access needed for fine-granular document content management. It is intended as a basis for collaboratively editing and sharing XML documents, and also provides an infrastructure for specialization towards specific applications and their document formats, such as validation, format-specific “XML-database views” and human-oriented presentation.