XML Warehousing Meets Sociology: Introducing the W3C XQuery Working Group

This paper describes a novel application of XML and Web based technologies, a sociological study of the W3C standardization process. They propose a new methodology and tools, to be used by sociologists to study the standardization process, illustrated by the W3C XQuery Working Group. The novelty of the approach has many facets. Information Technology (IT) has received little attention from sociologists, yet the standardization of the Web is a crucial issue, both economical and political, based on the use of a semi-structured content warehouse. They introduce a modeling and querying approach of an XML content warehouse, and show it produces high added-value information. This information is used to conduct a preliminary sociological analysis of the XQuery standardization process.