Managing Branch Versioning in Versioned/Temporal XML Documents

Due to the linear nature of time, XML timestamped solutions for the management of XML versions have difficulty in supporting non-lineal versioning. Following up on our previous work, which dealt with a new technique for the management of non-lineal versions of XML graph documents, called versionstamp, we have gone a step forward by adding temporal information to each version included in the document. Not only does it allow us to query the vDocuments on a temporal and version level but also we can manage branch versioning in the temporal axis. Moreover, to check its functionality, we have compared our technique to a timestamped XML solution and a set of Web services has been developed. The easy management of multiple versioning, the large number of queries in different XML standard query languages and its implementation by using only XML technology, are some of the advantages of the proposed technique.