W3C

Submission request to W3C (W3C Staff Comment)


We, W3C Member, AT&T Labs, hereby submit to the Consortium the following specification comprising the document(s) linked below:

  1. XML-QL: A Query Language for XML

which collectively are referred to as "the submission". We request the submission be known as the XML-QL submission.

Abstract

XML is a new standard that supports data exchange on the World-Wide Web. It is likely to become as important and as widely used as HTML.

The availability of large amounts of data on the Web raises several issues that the XML standard does not address. In particular, what techniques and tools should exist for extracting data from large XML documents, for translating XML data between different ontologies (DTD's), for integrating XML data from multiple XML sources, and for transporting large amounts of XML data to clients or for sending queries to XML sources.

We propose a query language for XML, called XML-QL, as one possible answer to these questions. The language has a SELECT-WHERE construct, like SQL, and borrows features of query languages recently developed by the database research community for semistructured data.

Intellectual property Rights

AT&T complies with the formal patent policies of ANSI, ISO and the ITU as well as several industry groups that have adopted patent policies. In general, AT&T will license for fair and reasonable terms, in a non-discriminatory manner, all companies who are practicing an industry standard for which AT&T has notified that industry body in writing of its intent to license. AT&T reserves the right, as stated in these policies, not to license, and if so will notify the standards body early in the process of specifying the standard. AT&T will always want to know if it is the clear intent of an industry body to adopt a specific standard, before providing such a letter, either to license or not to license.

Names

At this time, there are no registered marks in the submission.

Specification

AT&T agrees that the submission may be distributed within the membership of the W3C free of any fee or may be distributed publicly free of any fee under the redistribution terms expressed in the W3C copyright statement.

Implementation

The following points should be noted as regards licensable technology involved in any third party implementations of the technology specified in the submission: AT&T licenses the implementations along with the standards rights at the time of license negotiations.

Suggested action

We suggest that the Consortium hold a workshop to discuss query languages for XML and to discuss the design issues raised in the submission. We would like this workshop to include both database researchers and active members of the XML working group. Our intent is to stimulate discussion and collaboration between the two communities.

Resources

To help with this work, we expect to be able to provide one non-resident document editor to the Consortium.

Change control

Should any changes be required to the document, we expect to have control over all future versions of any documents or specifications derived from this specification.

Contact

Inquiries from the public or press about this submission should be directed to:
Mary Fernandez
Senior Technical Staff Member
AT&T Labs - Research
180 Park Ave., Bldg 103, E243
Florham Park, NJ 07932-0971
973-360-8679
mff@research.att.com

Dan Suciu
Principal Technical Staff Member
AT&T Labs - Research
180 Park Ave., Bldg 103, E233
Florham Park, NJ 07932-0971
973-360-8671
suciu@research.att.com

Submitted

this 7th day of August, 1998,