[xquery-talk] Geospatial and XQuery?

[Martin Probst]

Hi,

> If so, what would the geospatial functions look like in a query?

> Have any of the XQuery or XML database products (commercial or open- 
> source) implemented geospatial functions ahead of the spec? If so,  
> what do these look like?

X-Hive/DB is used by Galdos (http://www.galdosinc.com/) in Cartalinea.
They did not need custom functions that much as fast range queries on
XML attributes, e.g. to find certain specific elements that are within
(in the spatial, not in the XML sense) a set of coordinates.

So basically they needed fast range index lookups on XQuery, XPointer
and XPath queries. 

I don't think there is a need for a standardisation on specific
geospatial functions, especially as you can extend nearly every XQuery
implementation with your own custom functions so you can use these
custom functions as an adaptor-like wrapper around a library in e.g.
Java.

Martin