Indirection in XQuery/XPath

Hi There,

The ability to follow links and pointers (or anchors) is probably 
worthwhile considering.  Take a query such as - "get all paragraphs that 
contain a citation of a paper authored by Kohonen".   This is a common 
requirement in bibliography searching where you want the exact context of 
the citation.   If the citation reference is implemented as an anchor 
(XPointer?) then it will not include explicit author details and hence the 
paragraphs cannot be selected directly by using "Kohonen" as a search 
argument.  Rather, having found Kohonen in the bibliography section of an 
article we need to take the citation-id and use it as a search argument in 
paragraphs selection (indirection).
This may be too complex a requirement, but it is certainly a "nice to 
have".  (This is akin to performing a join following a foreign key in an 
SQL query)

It can be further enhanced if we were to support following links (XLink?) 
to other documents - for instance, extend the example above to include 
selection terms that can only be got at by inspecting the cited Kohonen 
paper itself (i.e, another document altogether).  Indirection following 
XLinks and XPointers would be a really nice feature in a retrieval engine, 
albeit perhaps too complicated as an explicit and bare user interface 
feature.

Regards,

Shlomo



Shlomo Geva, PhD
Centre for Information Technology Innovation
(Office: 126 Margaret St, Room 306)
Faculty of Information Technology
Queensland University of Technology
GPO Box 2434,
Brisbane, Q 4001, AUSTRALIA

( Phone: +61 7 3864 9326
7 Fax:      +61 7 3864 9390
8 Email: s.geva@qut.edu.au