From: Bob Lord (rlord@xyzfind.com)
Date: Fri Nov 30 2001 - 18:06:15 CET
Perhaps the easiest way to understand TransQuery is to recognize the
problem it tries to address. Assume you have a disk full of XML
documents - thousands of them. Additionally assume that you want to use
a widespread standard language to process the information they contain.
What does 'process' mean? In general it means to transform: obtain the
result of applying some function to each document. In practice you might
want to render some subset of the information as HTML or perhaps you
want to locate a particular XML fragment based on its content, structure
or whatever.
Certainly rendering as HTML sounds like an XSLT kind of task, but how do
you apply a single stylesheet to multiple documents? You'll need to
write a script or something to apply your stylesheet to each document in
turn and somehow knit together the output from each one or you'll need
to embed that logic in the stylesheet itself. So the "old idea" in
TransQuery is a standard way of doing that, so that stylesheet authors
can rely on the mechanism that will allow their stylesheets to be
applied to multiple documents. You can read about the meta-document
approach used by TransQuery at
http://www.xmlportfolio.com/transquery/specification/#meta-document.
Now locating an XML fragment based on its content is what most folks
would call a query. Bad tools for this job might include 'grep' or a
full-text search engine. The "new idea" in TransQuery is that XSLT is a
good tool for this job. There have been several proposed XML query
languages and a couple more are in the works, but none of them have
reached the W3C Recommendation level like XSLT has nor do any of them
have the widespread support in the form of multiple implementations,
support groups, online and offline documentation and easily thousands of
skilled users. You can see some great examples of XSLT as query language
at http://xyzfind.com/transquery.
So what is TransQuery? TransQuery is a specification that defines a
particular way to use XSLT to process the information in multiple XML
source documents. It offers developers a current standard language for
processing (transforming, querying) the data in an XML repository or XML
database.
-- Bob Lord
-----Original Message-----
From: cutlass [mailto:cutlass@secure0.com]
Sent: Friday, November 30, 2001 5:59 AM
To: transquery-discuss@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: [transquery-discuss] kick off discussion
Hello all,
question 1: the documentation is very unclear as to 'what' transquery is
...
cheers, jim fuller
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