Management XQuery Exercise

Code snippets for XQuery Working Group (Text Mining at Scale)

This example demonstrates a text-mining workflow for querying the Victorian Women Writers Project corpus stored in a BaseX database, using XQuery and XPath Full Text 1.0. It walks through creating structured records from TEI XML, saving them to a new database, and running full-text searches with scoring, stemming, and thesaurus-based matching. The code exercises functions like `db:replace`, `ft:mark`, and `ft:extract` to highlight matching text, while also showing stop-word filtering and boolean operators for queries.

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XQuery Blue Mountain Project - Part III

This example shows a pipeline for transforming a single TEI XML document from the Blue Mountain Project—a digitized 1920 issue of the French journal *Action*—into clean, article-level TEI files. The first script removes facsimile elements, end-hyphenation markers, and line breaks, replacing `<lb>` elements with spaces. A second script extracts metadata and article content into a fresh TEI template, while a third builds individual TEI files for each article. The code uses XQuery 3.1 with the `fn:doc` API for document access and node operations like `copy`, `modify`, and `replace node`.

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Blue Mountain Project - Dividing Up Languages

This example shows how XQuery processes TEI-encoded periodical documents from the Blue Mountain Project, splitting them into individual articles for database storage. The code traverses document collections with `fn:collection` and `fn:doc`, prunes unwanted elements and attributes using the `copy`/`modify` XQuery Update Facility, and reconstructs TEI structures. It uses the `db:create` function from the eXist-db API to build a new database collection from the transformed articles, demonstrating a pipeline for dividing source documents into discrete, queryable units.

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XQuery Full Text

This example demonstrates the evolution of text search in XQuery, from basic string matching to full-text querying with linguistic processing. It shows how `fn:contains` and `fn:matches` perform literal pattern matching, while the XQuery Full Text 3.1 features—`contains text`, `using stemming`, `ft:mark`, and the `score` clause—enable case-insensitive, stem-aware, ranked search results. The code queries a collection of TEI-encoded texts (`vwwp_tei`) and returns matched paragraphs, with scoring wrapped in XML output and string formatting via `format-number`.

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<title>Testing XPath

This example demonstrates how XPath and the XQuery `typeswitch` expression can be used to selectively process different node types in an XML document. It shows a TEI-encoded text where comments, text nodes, and `<p>` elements are handled distinctly, with element attributes joined into a space-separated string. The code relies on the XQuery 3.0 standard library functions `fn:string` and `fn:string-join`, operating on the TEI namespace declared in the document. The visualization is static, with no graphical rendering; instead, it highlights the programmatic traversal and conditional branching over the XML tree structure.

Gist ccc08dae693660d7aa1b8cf2708fd13d

This example demonstrates how to query and highlight text passages in the Victorian Women Writers Project TEI corpus using XQuery 3.1. It shows a progression from simple full-text searches for repeated terms to fuzzy matching via `ft:search` and `ft:extract`, and finally visualizes results by marking hits with `ft:mark` and segmenting them into tumbling windows. The code relies on BaseX’s full-text and windowing capabilities to extract and structure paragraph-level matches containing “garden” or “house.”

Grouping example

This example shows how XQuery groups report records by author and clearance status, revealing the distribution of cleared, not acquired, and unknown items per author. It first defines a function that maps numeric clearance flags to categorical labels, then queries the `ReportMaster` collection. Using the `group by` clause, it aggregates records by both author and status, while `fn:replace` extracts the author’s surname for ordering. The output is a series of `<report>` elements containing the author and status. The code relies on the XQuery 3.1 standard, specifically the `collection` function and `group by` syntax, with no external visualization libraries.

Filtering with where clauses

This example shows a simple XML data filter that selects only fiction books from a hardcoded set and returns them sorted alphabetically. It uses the XQuery language, specifically the `where` clause to exclude items with a `class` attribute value of "nonfiction", and the `order by` clause to sort the remaining books by their text content. The query processes an inline `<books>` element containing five `<book>` entries, each with a `class` attribute, and returns the filtered, ordered book titles.