The goal of the Working Group is to develop an Application Programming Interface (API) for XML databases. This API should be vendor neutral to support use with the largest array of databases possible. The API is also intended to be implementable in multiple languages though it does assume the implementation language is object oriented.

Current Releases:

• Working Draft, last release Sept. 24, 2001
• API Use Cases Draft, last release Sept. 24, 2001
• Draft Requirements, last release Nov. 15, 2000
• Java Interfaces, last release Sept. 24, 2001

Mailing List:

• List: The Xmldb-org-xapi mailing list
• Post: mailto:xmldb-org-xapi@lists.sourceforge.net
• Mail Archive: http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive

Implementations:

• The reference implementation is available for download. This implementation provides a simple file system based implementation of the API. The download also includes the most current Java intefaces and the driver development kit to make creating Java drivers easier. This implementation is current with the Sept. 24 draft. Released on Nov. 11, 2001. This is the initial public release.
• The dbXML Project has a complete Core Level 1 Java implementation based on the Sept. 24 draft. The implementation is part of the 1.0b3 release of the dbXML Core.
• The eXist Project has a Core Level 1 Java implementation based on the Sept. 24 draft. The implementation is part of the 0.6 release of eXist.
• The Ozone Project is working on a Java implementation based on the May 07 draft. Work is in the early stages.
• Jeremias Maerki has developed a java implementation for JDBC datasources based on the May 07 draft. Download

If you know of any other implementations that are in progress please email info@xmldb.org so that we may add them to the list.

Older Documents:

• May. 7, 2001 Working Draft
• May. 7, 2001 API Use Cases Draft
• Mar. 15, 2001 Working Draft (Experimental)
• Mar. 15, 2001 API Use Cases Draft (Experimental)
• Proposed Draft API (Uche Ogbuji - Fourthought Inc.) Last updated January 10, 2001
• Proposed Draft API (Lars Martin - SMB GmbH) Last updated January 3, 2001
• Proposed Draft API (Tom Bradford, Kimbro Staken - The dbXML Group), Last updated November 17, 2000

Other Pointers:

• XML Query Working Group Copyright 2000 by W3C:
  "The mission of the XML Query working group is to provide flexible query facilities to extract data from real and virtual documents on the Web, therefore finally providing the needed interaction between the web world and the database world. Ultimately, collections of XML files will be accessed like databases."
• XML and Databases, Copyright 1999-2000 by Ronald Bourret:
  "This paper briefly discusses the relationship between XML and databases and describes some of the types of software available to process XML documents with databases. Although it is not intended to be exhaustive, I hope that it describes some of the major issues in using XML with databases. It is somewhat biased towards relational databases simply because that is where my experience is."