tauXUF: A Temporal Extension of the XQuery Update Facility Language for the tauXSchema Framework

Although temporal XML data are being stored and manipulated by several XML-based applications in different domains (e.g., e-commerce, e-health), there is neither a temporal XML update language proposed by researchers nor built-in support provided by existing XML DBMSs and tools, for maintaining such data. Furthermore, in the well known temporal XML framework tauXSchema, there are no features for inserting, deleting or updating temporal XML instances. In this paper, we bridge these gaps by proposing a temporal extension of the W3C XQuery Update Facility (XUF) language, named tauXUF (Temporal XUF), which allows manipulating temporal XML data in tauXSchema. With tauXUF both the syntax and the semantics of the update expressions of the XUF language are extended to support temporal aspects. Examples are also provided to motivate and illustrate our proposal.