First of all, I think you'd need to define what a
collection is before we go on from there. From what I've seen from the native
XML database space, no one is exactly sure if a collection is simply a
directory containing many XML documents or more akin to a relational database
table.
The
current thinking - and the final decision may vary - is that a collection is a
persistent sequence identified by a URI, where a sequence is as defined in the
XQuery/XPath data model. Mechanisms for accessing a collection by URI are
probably in-scope for XQuery, mechanisms for defining a collection are likely
to be left implementation-defined. Implementations might map a collection to
concepts such as a filestore directory, a WebDAV collection, a database table,
or an XML-based catalog.
Mike
Kay
