[xquery-talk] Does XQuery fit anywhere in this landscape.

[daniela florescu]

> 
> Long before XML (about 1990, I think) I submitted a VLDB paper about a database/repository holding software engineering artifacts whose structure/schema was defined in BNF. Two of the reviewers gave it 9/10, two of them gave it 2/10. So yes: the traditional database research community, of whom Stonebraker was for many years the high priest, has problems understanding data outside their traditional customer/orders/suppliers domain.

There is something else Michael.

Unfortunately, your ideas were way TOO EARLY for people to understand them.

As they say in business: “being too early is the same of being wrong”.

In business timing is everything.

(and research in CS is often a comic parody of the industry, not a real scientific field..)

The questions are:

1. if you take the exact same paper and submit it today to VLDB, will they understand it now ?
(my bet is STILL not)
2. if not VLDB, is there a community who does understand it ?
(my bet is JSON community is still too young to get it, unfortunately)

If not those, who else ? Which community, or which vertical WOULD get that paper now ?

Dana