Describing multistructured XML documents by means of delay nodes

• Authors: Jacques Le Maitre
• Venue: Proceedings of the 2006 ACM symposium on Document engineering
• Year: 2006

Multistructured documents are documents whose structure is composed of a set of concurrent hierarchical structures. In this paper, we propose a new model of multistructured documents and we show how to translate its instances into XML using a new kind of nodes: delay nodes, which we propose to add to the XDM model on which XPath and XQuery are based. A delay node is the virtual representation, by an XQuery query, of some of the children of its parent. Interest of delay nodes to manage multistructured documents is that they allow several nodes to virtually share their children nodes. In this way, it is possible to query, with XPath or XQuery, multistructured documents described in XML as if their different structures were really concurrent. Finally, we compare our model with the GODDAGbased model and the multicolored trees (MCT) model.