F2/XML: Navigating through linked XML documents

As eXtensible Markup Language (XML) has become an emerging standard for data representation and data exchange on the Web, there is an increasing trend to store XML data in databases, in order to use the mature technology of database systems. The approaches which have been proposed so far handle non-linked XML documents. One of the reasons for the phenomenal growth of the Internet is the ability for documents to link to other documents. Therefore, linking capabilities for XML documents have recently been proposed using XLink and XPointer. In this paper, we present the F2/XML method to store linked XML documents in object databases and navigate through them. We illustrate our method with an example.