Flexible Information Retrieval on XML Documents

XML – short for the eXtended Markup Language defined by the World Wide Web Consortium in 1998 – is very successful as a format for data interchange. The reason is the high flexibility of the semistructured data model underlying XML [3]. Therefore, XML documents are well suited for a broad range of applications covering both rigidly structured data such as relations as well as less rigorously structured data such as text documents. So far, research on database systems has spent much effort on data-centric processing of rigidly structured XML documents. However, the importance of document-centric processing increases the more XML extends to application domains requiring less rigorously structured data representation.