XQuery 2019 IMap

[Hans-Juergen Rennau <hrennau@yahoo.de>]

Hello, hello, has anybody the postal address of Sir Tim Berners-Lee? I want to write him a letter, expressing my disappointment. I shall not mince words, trusting that truly great minds are not touchy. I want to ask - how can the closing of the XQuery Working Group be explained, if not by a headstrong refusal to think deeply?

But Sir Timothy has many fish to fry, thus cannot think about everything with equal depth. This is where my letter comes in.

I shall remind him how our minds are lead and mislead by words. This may have played a role. "XQuery" is a double lie - it is not about XML, and it is not a query language. It is about mapping information. (Note the subset relationships, information>XML, mapping>query.) It were better called "IMap".

Mapping information is the core business of every functional language (mapping function parameters to return value, expression operands and context to expression value). What is new and truly unique is the way tree structure is built into the mapping language (via node model and path expression) - tree structure, ubiquitous in our minds and resources consumed and produced.  A resource-oriented information mapping language.

True, the generalization from XML to Information is still rudimentary - we need standardized parsing of non-XML resources into XDM node trees.

True, the sister paradigm of information structure, graph, is still not supported natively - it should be integrated into the XDM (adding RDF triples and RDF datasets) as well as the expression language (adding SPARQL expressions).

But these shortcomings just point to the need of an XQuery Working Group - for a continuation of the journey from XQuery to IMap..

WIth kind regards,

Hans-Juergen Rennau