Building an XPath-Powered Framework for XML Data Processing
http://www.idealliance.org/proceedings/xml04/abstracts/paper226.html

Scardina, Mark and Jinyu Wang
IDEAlliance
2004

Abstract:

As XML formatted content and data becomes pervasive on intranets and the Internet the requirement to minimize individual process times becomes great. XPath has been evolving into a rich expression language to query and extract data in a precise way. While it has been designed to be used by a host language such as XSLT and XQuery, an XPath processor can be used quite usefully standalone or as part of an application framework.