GQL: Extending XQuery to Query GML Documents

GML is becoming the de facto standard for electronic data exchange among the applications of Web and distributed geographic information systems. However, the conventional query languages (e.g. SQL and its extended versions) are not suitable for direct querying and updating of GML documents. Even the effective approaches working well with XML could not guarantee good results when applied to GML documents. Although XQuery is a powerful standard query language for XML, it is not proposed for querying spatial features, which constitute the most important components in GML documents. We propose GQL, a query language specification to support spatial queries over GML documents by extending XQuery. The data model, algebra, and formal semantics as well as various spatial functions and operations of GQL are presented in detail.