Symmetrically Exploiting XML

Path expressions are the principal means of locating data in a hierarchical model. But path expressions are brittle because they often depend on the structure of data and break if the data is structured differently. The structure of data could be unfamiliar to a user, may differ within a data collection, or may change over time as the schema evolves. This paper proposes a novel construct that locates related nodes in an instance of an XML data model, independent of a specific structure. It can augment many XPath expressions and can be seamlessly incorporated in XQuery or XSLT.