Re: request for practical usage examples of XQuery

I would be very happy if you could send me some samples of the historical 
data and some typical XSLT sheets you use for querying. If the data is 
suitable, I might want to use it in my experiments (with your permission of 
course) and check whether subjects are more productive with XSLT, XQuery or 
SQL/XML querying this kind of material.

Actually, when I started looking for data and queries for my experiments, 
my advisor pointed me to a Ph.D. thesis from 1987 about the economical 
decline of the Dutch city Delft in the 18th century. In this thesis 
archived lists of housing holds are structured with a context-free grammar, 
entered in a computer, and queried with a special purpose query program. 
Unfortunately, the original data is lost, so I could only read the examples 
and conclude that the structure used is quite similar to SGML/XML. It would 
be an excellent use case for my research though.

Regards,

Joris Graaumans
Institute of Information and Computing Sciences
Utrecht University


At 10:10 AM 6/9/2003 +0100, Donald Spaeth wrote:
>I couldn't agree more.  I've spent the last year developing stylesheets for
>querying historical data using XSLT.  I haven't had a chance to investigate
>XQuery properly yet, so I'm not yet sure it will do what I want.  Historical
>source materials are good examples of semistructured data, but they have
>been conventionally represented as relational tables.  The challenge is to
>represent the structure as it appears, but to query the data as if they
>consisted of relational tables.  (Representing the data as literal
>relational tables with ID numbers, as in the XML Query Use Cases example, is
>a less interesting way of addressing the problem.)
>
>Typical applications involve constructing frequencies and contingencies
>tables which count particular element values, usually based upon
>standardised data; and preparation of coded data in  matrices for analysis
>in statistical software.  For example, one might count the number of rooms
>per house, and see how these changed over time, or count the number of halls
>with cooking equipment.  (My research is based upon lists of household goods
>from the seventeenth century.)  All of this can be done in XSLT.
>
>If we set aside XSLT syntax errors (very common!), the most frequent errors
>result from confusion about what the current unit of analysis is and where
>one is in the hierarchy.  I find myself checking and double-checking that
>nodesets have the information I expect them to have.
>
>Best,
>Donald Spaeth
>
>Dr Donald Spaeth
>Senior Lecturer in Historical Computing
>Department of History
>2 University Gardens
>University of Glasgow
>Glasgow  G12 8QQ
>
>tel. 0141 330 3580
>reply to:  d.spaeth@history.arts.gla.ac.uk

Received on Wednesday, 11 June 2003 04:44:38 UTC