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Re: xml search engine?

• From: Tim Bray <tbray@t...>
• To: xml-dev@x...
• Date: Wed, 29 Mar 2000 10:08:48 -0800

There have been XML search engines back as far as 1991 or thereabouts,
then operating of course under the rubric of SGML search engines.  The 
problems are identical.  For some years, there was a period when the 
marketplace had exactly two vendors with credibility in this space: EBT,
now part of Inso, with the "Dynatext" and other Dyna-* products, and my 
company Open Text with "Pat".

So there is a considerable body of experience as to what such an API might
be like.  For some reason, little of it is reflected in XPath.  W3C held
a workshop on the notion of a query language for XML back in 1998, the
proceedings are at http://www.w3.org/TandS/QL/QL98/, there are tons of
position papers.  I wrote one that described the API offered by the old
Open Text product at http://www.w3.org/TandS/QL/QL98/pp/sets.html, with
extensions for namespaces.

I remain convinced that my proposal offers everything you need in the real
world to build successful applications that query the deep structure of
XML.  At Open Text we proved that it can be implemented in a way that scales
across huge volumes of data.

My feeling is that the likelihood is that W3C will end up doing a QL
that is in some sense cognate with XPath.  I'd love someone to step up
and prove that a lighter-weight approach would work.  Note: I'm not on 
that WG nor have I been following their work closely. -Tim

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