Standing on the Shoulders of Giants: digital platform designing with native XPath enabled storage and retrieval on MySQL

XML has become a standard for the exchange and retrieval of semi-structured data between different platforms but is not currently a standard for storing semi-structured data in relational databases. There exist a number of different approaches in transforming or mapping semi-structured documents into the highly structured relational database schema. In this paper we do not present a new approach on native XPath enabled RDBMS but instead looking at a new implementation case for the popular MySQL database system and its implication for standard in designing open source based digital communication systems as well as implications for the information retrieval scientific community.