XQuery 1.0 and XPath 2.0 Full-Text

P. Case Powerful queries of character strings, numbers, dates, and nodes are familiar to users of relational database systems. Full-text database search systems feature queries that (1) use logical, proximity, and starts-with operators, (2) offer user control of case and diacritics, stemming, and wildcards, and (3) support thesauruses, taxonomies, and ontologies. Two emerging standards, XQuery 1.0 and XQ/XPFT (XQuery 1.0 and XPath 2.0 Full-Text), combine the search capabilities of the aforementioned systems and promise to change the face of full-text searching. This paper explores the expected benefits of these standards in searching relational data and full-text documents in XML from an end user point of view and describes how these benefits would apply to a search system used at the Library of Congress. These standards have the potential to solve many real-life full-text search system problems and to restore the end-user control necessary to enable and facilitate complex searching.