Extending xQuery with transformation operators

In this paper, we propose to extend XQuery - the XML query language - with a set of transformation operators which will produce a copy of an XML tree in which some subtrees will be inserted, replaced or deleted. These operators - very similar to the ones proposed for updating an XML document - greatly simplify the expression of some queries in making it possible to express only the modified part of a tree instead of its whole reconstruction. We compare the expressivity of XQuery extended in this way with XSLT.

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