Lots of good things are happening with XQuery which is a nice change from the regular news.
First and foremost, MarkLogic Server 4.0 is out! With this release, MarkLogic Server is updated to XQuery 1.0 and has added some very cool features to extend the capabilities of XQuery.
The highlights are:
- Geospatial support. Lets you add location as a dimension to queries and find where your content is at. Like this search result from some content about earthquakes where the search is for the word 'new' AND anything within a 500 mile radius of Utica, NY:
- Entity Enrichment. Puts some smarts right into your content by marking up the people, places and things. This is coupled with an enrichment framework to plug your own text mining tool into the process.
- Alerting. Lets you notify people about new content they may be interested in. A key part of this is something called reverse-query which returns the queries that match incoming content. Very cool.
As usual theres a lot more in MarkLogic Server 4.0 and here are links to an overview and the developer site.
But it's not just Mark Logic that has been busy. At Elsevier the Article 2.0 contest is off and running. It's a chance to win $4000 by coming up with new ways to present scholarly articles. Who couldn't use a little bit of extra $$$ in these times? All you have to do is create the best new way to display the source XML Elsevier is providing. Here are some hints on how to use XQuery to give you an edge.
And overall XQuery is getting more and more attention. When I first started writing this blog (back in April of 2006 - wow thats more than 2 years ago!) XQuery was that strange language that used squiggly brackets and smiley faces and there just wasn't a lot of dicsussion about it.
In just the last couple of weeks I've seen:
- A video of an XQuery lecture from the University of Irvine
- Posts on XRX (XForms, REST, XQuery) outlining an new application stack where adopting the XML model and using XQuery greatly simplifies processing (here are some similar thoughts from me, me again and Dave Kellogg)
- The continuation of the wonderful XQuery, Multi-platform future meme/spam. As I discussed in this post a year ago, this very lightweight article was replicated throughout the internet as a simple traffic driving trick. XQuery had finally made enough of an impact to merit someone actually spending time spreading it around . . . and he's still doing it - just last week I got this article in another google alert.
So it's nice to see XQuery bring us some good news - sure beats the other kind.
Matt
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