XQL and proximal nodes

Despite the fact that several models to structure text documents and to query on this structure have been proposed in the past, a standard has emerged only relatively recently with the introduction of XML and its proposed query language XQL, on which we focus in this article. Although there exist some implementations of XQL, efficiency of the query engine is still a problem. We show in this article that an already existing model, Proximal Nodes, which was defined with the goal of efficiency in mind, can be used as an efficient query engine behind an XQL front-end.