Quilt: An XML Query Language for Heterogeneous Data Sources

The World Wide Web promises to transform human society by making virtually all types of information instantly available everywhere. Two prerequisites for this promise to be realized are a universal markup language and a universal query language. The power and flexibility of XML make it the leading candidate for a universal markup language. XML provides a way to label information from diverse data sources including structured and semi-structured documents, relational databases, and object repositories. Several XML-based query languages have been proposed, each oriented toward a specific category of information. Quilt is a new proposal that attempts to unify concepts from several of these query languages, resulting in a new language that exploits the full versatility of XML. The name Quilt suggests both the way in which features from several languages were assembled to make a new query language, and the way in which Quilt queries can combine information from diverse data sources into a query result with a new structure of its own.