The shortcut to this page is vanderbi.lt/xquery

XQuery Resources

Many of the linked resources on this page are from the XQuery for Humanists workshop materials created by Clifford Anderson. Individual linked pages are organized by topic below, but you can start at the landing page to access them in the order they were presented at the workshop.

Processor options and installation

There are several XQuery processor options. BaseX is popular because it is open source and is relatively easy to install and run as a stand-alone application. eXist is also open source but has a bigger learning curve because it is more complex and requires using a browser-based system to execute basic queries. However, eXist also has powerful features for building web applications. On can also run XQuery queries using the very full-featured oXygen XML editor. However, oXygen is not open source and requires a paid subscription.

Each of these processors will run queries that consist entirely of standard XQuery functions. However, they also include special processor-specific functions that extend the functionality of XQuery, but that are non-standard and therefore will not work in other processors.

The XQuery4Humanists site provides some bare-bones instructions for getting started with the three XQuery processors listed above. For more detailed instructions on installing BaseX, see the presentation below.