Extending XQuery With Selection Operations to Allow for Interactive Construction of Queries

XQuery is the standard language for querying XML documents using structural and content restrictions. In this paper, we propose to extend XQuery with selection operations that allow for the selection of the interesting subset of elements from each intermediate result of a query. To make this possible, intermediate results must be available during the construction of the query. This helps the user in building a query to retrieve the desired result. XQuery is being extended with a Full-Text language that allows to perform operations on text treating it as a sequence of words, units of punctuation, and spaces. This language includes a score clause that associates relevance measures to the results. The computation of these measures can be done using the method we also describe in this paper.