TempoX: A disciplined approach for data management in multi-temporal and multi-schema-version XML databases

Abstract

Although multi-temporal XML databases supporting schema versioning are used in several domains, like e-commerce, e-health, and e-government, existing database management systems and XML tools do not provide any support for managing (inserting, updating, and deleting) temporal XML data or temporal XML schema versioning. Besides, whereas much research work has focused in the last decade on schema versioning in temporal XML databases, any attention has been devoted to manipulating data in such databases. To fill this theoretical and practical gap, we propose in this paper a generic approach, named TempoX (Temporal XML), for data manipulation in multi-temporal and multi-schema-version XML databases. Indeed, we (i) define a new multi-temporal XML data model supporting temporal schema versioning, named TempoXDM (Temporal XML Data Model), (ii) introduce the principles on which our approach is based, and (iii) provide the specifications of the basic data manipulation operations: “insert”, “replace”, “evolve”, and “delete”. Moreover, to show the feasibility of TempoX, we use it to propose a temporal XML update language, named TempoXUF (Temporal XQuery Update Facility), as an extension of the W3C XQuery Update Facility language to temporal and versioning aspects. Furthermore, to validate our language proposal, we develop a system prototype, named TempoXUF-Manager, that supports TempoXUF.