One such body is the American National Standards Institute or ANSI which is a non-profit private organization that surprisingly institutes standards the industry accepts voluntarily. Other influential standards organizations include the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers or IEEE and the Organization for Standardization or ISO. The IEEE was the organization that defined LAN standards in the Project 802 or the 802 series. These projects could be the blueprints that could be used to make XML more effective by using PAT Algebra Operators for query needs.

XML PAT Algebra Operators

The internet is based on a foundation of distributed hypertext. There is also plenty of proof that the internet could be regarded as a large distributed database where there are million to billions of queries processed daily. "XML is too slow an exchange format for any large volume of data transfer. It is fine for exchange of small amounts of data on the fly but when you get to the stage of wanting to transfer Gigabytes of data when converted to XML that mushrooms pretty rapidly. Before XML becomes any more mainstream it should be looked at now to see how compression can be adopted. It must be backward compatible so that uncompressed XML will work with new compressed aware apps." (Tech Republic, 2005)

XML as a language does exactly that. XML was designed to make the information that is scattered all around the world to seem more like a large repository of database that can be retrieved by using XML. The problem is that databases such as Oracle or ACCESS can use the specific programming languages that are like or incorporate the Sequential Query Language or SQL. "The mission of the XML Query project is to provide flexible query facilities to extract data from real and virtual documents on the World Wide Web, therefore finally providing the needed interaction between the Web world and the database world. Ultimately, collections of XML files will be accessed like databases." (W3C, 2005)

Thus, XML Query is currently attempting to develop a standard for querying web documents. "However, the XML Query (XQuery) project is all-around, and also includes in its efforts not only the standard for querying XML documents, but also the next-generation standards for doing XML selection (XPath2), for doing XML serialization, for doing Full-Text Search, for providing a possible functional XML Data Model, and for providing a standard set of functions and operators for manipulating web data." (W3C, 2005)

The internet has no unique equivalent to SQL. Although XML has been designed to be as simple as possible in regard to client-side processing, XML does not equate to SQL when it comes to retrieving the electronic publishing or data interchange. Thus, by creating a standardized methodology for the XML PAT Algebra Operators through a physical evaluation and assigning them a cost may facilitate a simplification of the development process; there may be a way to increase the effectiveness of the XML retrieval process.

In other...

The algebra queries could be derived from a nested relational algebra similar to object-oriented databases. The XML process of retrieval currently uses tree like or based macro-algebras for query processing and micro-algebras that are more like individual nodes. By assigning costs, it could be possible to merge operators and also to create a situation where single access methods could be used to evaluate a multiple operators. The objective would be to use the PAT operators to create a framework that could take advantage of both macro-algebras and micro-algebras for XML. From that, new access methods from the operator combinations
Conclusion

This abstract proposal presented a foreshadowing of what would be the foundation of a full evaluative report on how the Extensible Markup Language (XML) PAT Algebra Operators could be physically evaluated and thus be assigned with a cost that would help standardize the XML programming query process. The advances in computing hardware and software as well as the World Wide Web have revolutionized politics, science and the business world. One way this has been accomplished has been through standardization. Standardization has therefore greatly influenced and enhanced the majority of research, development and productivity in a large number of industries by reducing maintenance, costs while simplifying cycles of the production process. The XML programming language should be no exception. By standardizing the XML PAT Algebra Operators through physically evaluation and then assigning them a cost, the query process could be greatly enhanced.