XTQ: A Declarative Functional XML Query Language

Abstract: Various query languages have been proposed to extract and restructure information in XML documents. These languages, usually claiming to be declarative, mainly consider the conjunctive relationships among data elements. In order to present the operations where the hierarchical and the disjunctive relationships need to be considered, such as restructuring hierarchy and handling heterogeneity, the programs in these languages often exhibit a procedural style and thus the declarativeness in them is not so prominent as in conventional query languages like SQL. In this paper, we propose a declarative pattern-based functional XML query language named XML Tree Query (XTQ). XTQ adopts expressive composite patterns to present data extraction, meanwhile establishing the conjunctive, the disjunctive and the hierarchical relationships among data elements. It uses the matching terms, a composite structure of the variables bound to the matched data elements, to present a global sketch of the extracted data, and develops a deductive restructuring mechanism of matching terms to indicate data transformation, especially for restructuring hierarchy and handling heterogeneity. Based on matching terms, XTQ employs a coherent approach to function declaration and invocation to consistently extract and construct composite data structure, which integrates features of conventional functional languages and pattern-based query languages. Additionally, XTQ also supports data filtering on composite data structure such as hierarchical data, which is seldom deliberately considered in other studies. We demonstrate with various examples that XTQ can declaratively present complex XML queries which are common in practice.