5. Conclusion

This article deals with the storage and manipulation of electronic documents in the context of database approaches. It first presents a type of metastructure on which any language for manipulating documents or document fragments is based. Secondly, it describes the functionalities of a document manipulation language that integrates the main features found in existing languages. A key feature of this type of language is its ability to refer to the metastructure of the document database, as well as to the specific structure of each document stored in the database. It can also be used to construct virtual documents resulting from a language query.

This article outlines the generic aspects of current proposals, but remains limited to document manipulation via declarative languages. These relatively complex languages are increasingly being integrated into graphical user...