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[xsl] Searching for values in XML using XSL using Saxon

2010-10-14 06:01:42
Good day,

I am trying to write a system on a pure XML data store. There are various 
reasons for doing this, but the most important is that I am always transforming 
the results, and because the system's data structure is dynamic an 
hierarchical, so XML is a lovely fit.

One part of my data will be large vocabularies of data, like dictionaries, and 
I would like to know from the experts if I'm going to run into trouble in the 
long term and should rather move to a relational database solution with proper 
indexing etc. I intend to use Saxon, simply because it's written in Java, it 
supports XSLT 2.0 and Michael has a good history of sticking behind his product.

Other options may be using XML databases, but the visibility provided by free 
standing XML files compared to an administrator console to a database is nice.

The data will look something like this:

<topic>
<name>hamburger</name>
<related-topics><topic-ref>food</topic-ref><topic-ref>dead-cows</topic-ref><topic-ref>health</topic-ref>
<keywords>burger, ketchup, mustard, hungry</keywords>
<description>Hamburgers are nice, but are not always good for your health. They 
are especially bad for the health of the cow, but this is o.k. if you don't 
know the cow</description>
</topic>

These topics will be built on the fly during chatroom conversations, so the 
related-topics and keywords will not be known before hand. Yet, it's the 
related-topics and keywords, that will be used on-the-fly to find matching 
topics, and format them into diargrams and charts etc.

In a couple of month's time there will be thousands of topics, so I am looking 
for a way to do this that will scale. Another problem is that some topics may 
be different in structure, e.g. a topic on cars may have a <max-speed> element, 
while one on houses may have a <price>, again another reason why a dynamic 
hierarchical data store makes more sense than a traditional relational database.

If someone can give me some advice, or suggest an efficient search on something 
like the keywords, I will be very grateful.

Kind regards,
Jacobus
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