Et tu, XML? The downfall of the relational empire (abstract)

Three decades past, the relational empire conquered the hierarchical hegemony. Today, an upstart challenges the relational empire’s dominance, threatening the return of hierarchy. XML is Lisp’s bastard nephew, with uglier syntax and no semantics. Yet XML is poised to enable the creation of a web of data that dwarfs anything since the Library at Alexandria. This talk examines the design of XQuery, the W3C standard query language for XML, and looks at related phenomena such as XML Schema and the Semantic Web. For more information on XQuery see http://www.w3.org/XML/Query.html. Permission to copy without fee all or part of this material is granted provided that the copies are not made or distributed for direct commercial advantage, the VLDB copyright notice and the title of the publication and its date appear, and notice is given that copying is by permission of the Very Large Data Base Endowment. To copy otherwise, or to republish, requires a fee and/or special permission from the Endowment. Proceedings of the 27th VLDB Conference, Roma, Italy, 2001