Managing Evolving XML: Adding Updates to an XQuery Processor

Abstract XML is increasingly used to represent business sensitive data such as ontologies for corporate portals, Web services descriptions, or user profiles in wireless networks. In addition to querying, these applications often need to perform complex updates in order to accommodate the quickly evolving information. At VLDB we propose to demonstrate a prototype implementation for an update language fully integrated with XQuery, the W3C XML query language. We illustrate the use of this update language for the effective management of user profiles within a wireless network. Our prototype is fully functional and implemented on top of the Galax XQuery 1.0 query processor. 1. Introduction XML is increasingly used to represent business critical information, such as ontologies describing the content of corporate portals, transactions processed by e-commerce applications, declarative description of Web services, or user profiles in telephone or IP networks. Common to these examples are the large amount of heterogeneous and quickly evolving data that must be processed, and the high degree of availability and reliability required from the supporting software. Hence, XML is often the data representation of choice due to its flexible modeling capabilities, its support for heterogeneous environments, as well as its improved integration with data management software. For instance, a number of XML formats have been proposed to represent user profiles (e.g., GUP from 3GPP