About W3C XQuery 1.0 and XPath 2.0 Full-Text standard proposal

While current XML query processing languages, XPath 2.0 and XQuery 1.0 which are the W3C recommended standards for querying XML documents, operate on structured XML data, they are limited in expressing full-text queries. Recently, there is a new emerging standard proposed by the W3C to extend XPath and XQuery with complex full-text search queries by providing a set of composable predicates such as phrase matching, boolean connectives, proximity distance, stemming and thesauri.

The complete specification of XQuery Full-Text can be found in the XQuery 1.0 and XPath 2.0 Full-Text document.

High-level requirements for XQuery Full-Text can be found in the XQuery and XPath Full-Text Requirements document.

Many applications and XQuery Full-Text examples can be found in the XQuery 1.0 and XPath 2.0 Full-Text Use Cases.

More information on querying XML documents, and the W3C XML Query Working Group, can be found on the W3C XML Query homepage.

About GalaTex

What is GalaTex?

GalaTex is a conformant open-source implementation of the current W3C XQuery Full-Text standard proposal that extends Galax, the AT&T + Lucent XPath/XQuery implementation. It is an extension of the XQuery/XPath language and not of its data model. Currently, GalaTex supports all of the XQuery/Galax constructs and implements all of the XQuery Full-Text specification:

• XQuery 1.0 and XPath 2.0 Full-Text

• XQuery 1.0: An XML Query Language
• XML Path Language (XPath 2.0)

Why GalaTex?

GalaTex is a light-weight, portable, and extensible implementation of XQuery Full-Text. It comes with all the advantages of Galax and is the first public available implementation of the proposed standard.

The GalaTex Team

• Sihem Amer-Yahia, AT&T Labs - Research.
• Philip Brown, AT&T Labs - Research.
• Emiran Curtmola, University of California, San Diego.
• Mary Fernández, AT&T Labs - Research.

Thanks!

To Jayavel Shanmugasundaram and Chavdar Botev who implemented the first TeXQuery prototype on top of Quark.

To the members of the W3C XML XQuery Full-Text Task Force (FTTF).

To the Galax developer team for the Web interface structure.