Workshop's goal and interest themes

XQuery getting closer to completing its first standard. This is an important milestone and it is comparable to the SQL86 standard milestone in the sense that most of the journey is ahead of us. As in SQL, it is the application of technology that will shape XQuery. Research prototypes and products will play a key role in enabling researchers and practitioners in applying and enriching this technology. The most significant impact of XQuery will be in the areas that query languages such as SQL are not effective and a simple translation to SQL is not adequate. Given that XML documents often contain text as well as parametric data,  deeper integration of IR technology, both from the viewpoint of functionality and system implementation, is important. From the viewpoint of content, documents in XML repository more resemble HTML pages, where an XML repository must handle a huge variety of document schemas, and accept documents with new schemas. XML is rapidly becoming the standard for representation of information that flows in the internet or internets between organizations. XML repositories need to rapidly adapt with the evolving schema of the incoming information with no or minimum manual intervention. This view is drastically different from traditional DBMSs where the schema evolution of the DB is primarily managed by DBAs.

The purpose of the XIME-P in this workshop is (1) to gather researchers and practitioners from academia and industry together leading to a deeper understanding of what the research areas should be, and what we need to do in creation of research prototypes and products which will enable critical applications of XQuery, (2) propose where we go from here regarding the language functionality, (3) focus on the DBMS architecture alternatives.

XQuery implementation

We believe that discussing, comparing, and envisioning architectures for XQuery implementation can be extremely useful for the SIGMOD/PODS community.
Thus,  the XIME-P workshop intends to offer a venue for implementation overview papers, which may be more difficult to publish in a standard conference, while very valuable in our view. We welcome system overview contributions from the industry and academia, characterizing all aspects of the system (storage, query execution model, query optimization paradigm if any, supported language features etc.) Disseminating architectural knowledge and open issues will contribute to building a global view of what is currently being done in the field of XQuery processing; the progress in language standardization now allows  us to compare the usefulness of various approaches, pinpoint the technical aspects still unsolved, and envision future (and better) architectures.

XQuery application and experience

In addition to research papers, there is an emphasis on application and experience papers. To understand the issues involved in implementing XQuery, and the purpose of the various language features, early feedback from existing XQuery implementation would be very useful. Going beyond simple toy queries, we welcome contributions describing XQuery usage, in any possible application context. We are interested in exposing the technical advantage of using XML and XQuery in the considered application, and in users' experience regarding: language features, volume and nature of data managed, types of queries used, query processing performance, integration with the rest of the information system etc.

XQuery perspectives

While many have started implementing or using XQuery, the language's future is ahead of us. We aim at considering future applications, innovative and successful architectures, potential performance problems, and promising avenues for future research. We will discuss the potential influence of a very complex standard on academic research, typically focused on narrower and somehow more limited problems; on industrial implementations, driven by customers' needs, and on open-source efforts. How to reconcile complexity and ease of use? How to optimize the implementation of some language features, without hurting the rest? Are there interesting, commonly-recognized language subsets? Which will be the "XQuery success stories" in the next 5 years?

Submissions

 Please submit your papers at: https://msrcmt.research.microsoft.com/XIMEP2005