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Asked: 2026-06-05T14:54:25+00:00

I have to do some data mining on XML documents lately. Most of it

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I have to do some data mining on XML documents lately. Most of it ad-hoc, i.e, I don’t have the schema of the documents in advance, and I only run the query a couple of times. Some example queries are “how many elements have this sub-element value greater than 0” or “per some kind of elements, what is the sum of the values of some of their sub-elements”.

Running such queries in Java is awkward because (a) Java DOM processing is really cumbersome, and (b) I only need to run these queries a for a few times, not as a part of an application.

What is a recommended and currently-supported query language and tool for this scenario? Preferably interactive, free/open-source, and does not require storing the document in a database in advance (although it’s an option).

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  1. Editorial Team

    You need XQuery. It is purpose made to easily query XML, as can be read from a quote on XQuery homepage:

    XQuery is replacing complex Java or C++ [XML processing] programs with a few lines of code.

    I use the open-source program BaseX to easily query (large collections of) XML files. It also features a nice interactive visualization of the XML structure.

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