Mapping XML documents to the object-relational form

In e-commerce, partners doing business need to exchange many forms of documents as a means of communication between them through the Internet, such as product catalogs, purchase orders, invoices and so on. XML, which is a new standard adopted by World Wide Web Consortium to complement HTML for data exchange on the Web, has been used as a language for describing those documents used in e-commerce such as in xCBL. For XML to be used effectively in e-commerce, we need a system to store XML data, retrieve the data if a request is given, create a required document based on the data, and send the created document to the partners. In this paper, we are concerned with storing XML data. We suggest a method to store XML documents in the object-relational form as an alternative to get advantages from the two approaches of object-oriented and relational table forms. We then implement it on the Oracle 8i database.