LONG PAPER. BaseX is an early adopter of the upcoming XQuery Full Text Recommendation. This paper presents some of the enhancements made to the XML database to fully support the language extensions. The system's data and index structures are described, and implementation details are given on the XQuery compiler, which supports sequential scanning, index-based, and hybrid processing of full-text queries. Experimental analysis and an insight into visual result presentation of query results conclude the presentation.

Mere storage of personal data in state-of-the-art filesystems is a markedly well done job in current operating systems. Convenient access to and information retrieval from such data, however, is crucial to leverage the stored information. Thereby database style query languages can be of great use. We demonstrate a user level filesystem implementation that is built on recent semi-structured database storage techniques. As such, it serves as a storage layer for the BaseX XQuery processor and, while it appears to the operating system as a conventional filesystem, a large part of its content can be queried using XPath/XQuery.

MedioVis is a visual information seeking system which was designed especially for library data. The objective target was to create a system which simplifies and optimizes the user's information seeking process and thus further motivates the user to browse in the library stock. To enhance the motivation special attention was given to consider joy of use aspects during the design of the user interface. The primary user interface design is based on multiple coordinated views to offer a great variety of exploration possibilities in a directmanipulative manner. To accomplish a self-explanatory usability of the system for non-expert users, the development was accompanied by continuous user tests with casual and regular library users. At the end of the development process a comprehensive summative evaluation was conducted, comparing efficiency and joy of use of the existing web-based catalogue system KOALA of the library of the University of Konstanz with the MedioVis system. The results of this comparative evaluation show a significant improvement of the efficiency of the information seeking process with the help of MedioVis. The users also rated MedioVis significantly better in all dimensions of its hedonic quality and appeal compared with KOALA. 1 Motivation Retrieving relevant information on library catalogues has long time been quite a tedious job as the visual presentation of bibliographic metadata ignored most of the rules of usability and attractiveness which we are facing today and many systems did not match the users' retrieval behaviour as discovered by Borgman [1]. First improvements could be observed when early, purely text-based interfaces were replaced by graphical representations. Nevertheless, in most of the cases the internal systematic metadata structures were only visually reproduced, disregarding the user's need to get non-technical, more inviting views on the desired information. Moreover, as a means of retrieving information libraries have to compete with the internet. Although the internet is often criticised for its unreliable information space, especially by information experts, it should be accepted that more and more information seekers

Originally developed as a query language for XML databases, XQuery has evolved into a complete functional programming language. In order to unlock all optimization opportunities, XQuery processors therefore need to combine traditional query optimization with techniques used in optimizing compilers. In this paper, we discuss how the well-known technique of function inlining can be applied to XQuery. We present an implementation of function inlining based on the query processor of BaseX, an open-source XML database. Finally, a detailed quantitative evaluation demonstrates that the performance benefits obtained by blending compiler and query optimizer techniques surpass results from any one single technique.

A key difference between traditional humanities research and the emerging field of digital humanities is that the latter aims to complement qualitative methods with quantitative data. In linguistics, this means the use of large corpora of text, which are usually annotated automatically using natural language processing tools. However, these tools do not exist for historical texts, so scholars have to work with unannotated data. We have developed a system for systematic, iterative exploration and annotation of historical text corpora, which relies on an XML database (BaseX) and in particular on the Full Text and Update facilities of XQuery.