XQuery: An XML query language

The World Wide Web Consortium has convened a working group to design a query language for Extensible Markup Language (XML) data sources. This new query language, called XQuery, is still evolving and has been described in a series of drafts published by the working group. XQuery is a functional language comprised of several kinds of expressions that can be nested and composed with full generality. It is based on the type system of XML Schema and is designed to be compatible with other XML-related standards. This paper explains the need for an XML query language, provides a tutorial overview of XQuery, and includes several examples of its use.