When industry standards emerge one of the
very first things I do (instinctively) is commence a quest to
understand the essence of the standard's value proposition and then
unravel implementation challenges as they affect existing IT
infrastructure. The quest comprises the following steps:
-
What is this standard
-
Why is it important
-
What are the implementation challenges
When XQuery first came across my radar (late 90s
even before "XQuery" became the moniker for an XML Query Language)
I arrived at the following conclusions using the steps listed
above:
-
What is XQuery about? Its about querying XML
Documents (at the time real or virtual) in a repository. Basically,
its the SQL equivalent for the XML based Infobase;
-
Why is it important? Because we will need to
access, repurpose, and disseminate the contents of the Infobase for
a myriad of reasons which ultimately culminate in knowledge
creation;
-
What are the implementation challenges? Where do
I start? Anway, here are a few: