3. Pure semi-structured approach

3.1 Operating principle

With this type of approach, XML documents are either stored in a native XML DB, or directly on the file system.

The possibilities offered by the first case depend very much on the native XML DB under consideration. Most of them (such as Berkeley DB XML, eXist or Xyleme Zone Server) allow stored data to be queried via XQuery or a proprietary language.

In order to remain as "generalist" as possible, we will describe here the case where XML documents are stored directly on the file system. The information they contain is then extracted directly via XQuery.

For our application, in addition to the invoice XML files we wish to process, we have an XML file containing customer descriptions, as well...