Multidimensional XPath
Nikolaos Fousteris, Yannis Stavrakas, Manolis Gergatsoulis
Abstract: In Web applications it is often required to manipulate
information of semistructured nature, which may present variations according to
different circumstances. Multidimensional XML (MXML) is an extension of XML
suitable for representing data that assume different facets, having different
value and structure, under different contexts. In this paper, we consider the
problem of navigating and querying MXML. Navigating and querying must take into
account the additional features of MXML compared to XML. Those features stem
from the incorporation of context into MXML. We introduce an extension of XPath
called Multidimensional XPath (MXPath), which is suitable for navigating
in MXML documents, and allows for context-aware querying. We present the syntax
of MXPath, we provide examples demonstrating its use and investigate its
semantics.Keywords: Multidimensional semistructured databases, XPath,
XML, XML query