XML Data Management: Native XML and XML-Enabled Database Systems

1.1. Introduction

When XML first came into use, it was seen primarily as a data interchange standard. Since then it has come to be used for more and more things—even serving as the core for development and deployment platforms such as Microsoft's .NET. Increasingly, XML has become the means to model components of information systems, and those components automatically construct themselves around what has been expressed in XML. This represents the real potential of XML—the ability to model the behavior of an entire application in XML once, instead of repeatedly in different ways for each component of an application program.

As long as XML was used as a container for data managed by legacy systems, it was sufficient to consider only syntax when ...