XQuery as an Annotation Query Language: a Use Case Analysis
Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2002)
Abstract
Recent work has shown that single data model can represent many different kinds of Linguistic annotation. This data model can be expressed equivalently as a directed graph of temporal nodes (Bird and Liberman, Speech Communication, 2000) as a set of intersecting hierarchies (Cassidy and Harrington, Speech Communication, 2000). While some tools are being built to support this data model, there is as yet no query language that can be used to search annotations stored in this way. Since the hierarchical view of annotations has much in common with the XML data model, this paper examines a recent proposal for an XML query language as a candidate annotation query language. The methodology used is a use case analysis. The result of the analysis shows that XQuery provides many useful features particularly when queries include hierarchical constraints but that it is weak in expressing sequential constraints.