ZapNote: Xyleme
We often come to think of information as being either structured data stored in databases or unstructured documents stored on file systems or in full-text search engines. However, the reality is that information is represented in a wide spectrum of structures. XML is helping to bridge the worlds of structured and unstructured content by providing a unified means to represent information regardless of its structure. Since XML is inherently hierarchical and relies on tags to incorporate structure and meaning, the technologies for XML-based information retrieval and management are different from both database technologies and unstructured text technologies. Xyleme realizes that the value of an XML Data Store is not in simply a better store for XML data, but in the application of that data to store information that is neither completely structured nor completely unstructured — or in other words, to content.