Et tu, XML? The downfall of the relational empire (abstract)

Three decades past, the relational empire conquered the hierarchical hegemony. Today, an upstart challenges the relational empire’s dominance, threatening the return of hierarchy. XML is Lisp’s bastard nephew, with uglier syntax and no semantics. Yet XML is poised to enable the creation of a web of data that dwarfs anything since the Library at Alexandria. This talk examines the design of XQuery, the W3C standard query language for XML, and looks at related phenomena such as XML Schema and the Semantic Web.