Paper Info
Title
XQBE (XQuery By Example): A visual interface to the standard XML query language
Abstract
The spreading of XML data in many contexts of modern computing infrastructures and systems causes a pressing need for adequate XML querying capabilities; to address this need, the W3C is proposing XQuery as the standard query language for XML, with a language paradigm and a syntactic flavor comparable to the SQL relational language. XQuery is designed for meeting the requirements of skilled database programmers; its inherent complexity makes the new language unsuited to unskilled users.In this article we present XQBE (XQuery By Example), a visual query language for expressing a large subset of XQuery in a visual form. In designing XQBE, we targeted both unskilled users and expert users wishing to speed up the construction of their queries; we have been inspired by QBE, a relational language initially proposed as an alternative to SQL, which is supported by Microsoft Access. QBE is extremely successful among users who are not computer professionals and do not understand the subtleties of query languages, as well as among professionals who can draft their queries very quickly.According to the hierarchical nature of XML, XQBE's main graphical elements are trees. One or more trees denote the documents assumed as query input, and one tree denotes the document produced by the query. Similar to QBE, trees are annotated so as to express selection predicates, joins, and the passing of information from the input trees to the output tree.This article formally defines the syntax and semantics of XQBE, provides a large set of examples, and presents a prototype implementation.
Year
DOI
Venue
2005
10.1145/1071610.1071613
ACM Trans. Database Syst.
Keywords
DocType
Volume
xquery,visual query language,visual query languages,semi-structured data,SQL relational language,query input,xml,relational language,human interfaces,language paradigm,query language,unskilled user,visual interface,XML data,standard XML query language,new language,standard query language
Journal
30
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
2
0362-5915
54
PageRank 
References 
Authors
2.97
29
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Daniele Braga184447.17
Alessandro Campi235730.08
Stefano Ceri367721657.41