RE: status of "collections" in XPath / XQuery

First of all, I think you'd need to define what a collection is before we go on from there. From what I've seen from the native XML database space, no one is exactly sure if a collection is simply a directory containing many XML documents or more akin to a relational database table.

 

The current thinking - and the final decision may vary - is that a collection is a persistent sequence identified by a URI, where a sequence is as defined in the XQuery/XPath data model. Mechanisms for accessing a collection by URI are probably in-scope for XQuery, mechanisms for defining a collection are likely to be left implementation-defined. Implementations might map a collection to concepts such as a filestore directory, a WebDAV collection, a database table, or an XML-based catalog.

 

Mike Kay