Hi,

I'm very new to XML and have been reading all of the things I could
about it as I can. I'm currently involved in developing a central
document repository that is searchable and cosiists of different
document types, such as Word, PDF, text, etc. I understand that I can
develop metadata XML about each of the documents to describe what the
document is about. I can create a sort of "Book Information" data
structure that defines every file and its author, isbn, etc...Now the
only thing that I'm unsure of is what benifit, besides metadata, can I
get from porting to XML. I have this vision that I can probably create
a search engine that looks through each metatdata XML file to find the
file that is a match for my serch and then I can serve up that XML
file that contains a link to download the actual PDF, or DOC, or
whatever it is. However, I can just as easily do this with a the
current method, which is that I have a DB Schema that has all of these
things and then just execute a SQL query to dynamically generate a
page that serves the information. So I'm a bit confused as to how I
can benifit from XML and how I can tie my XML to my DB?

Unfortunately, there are many books that talk about the benifits of
XML, but not many teach us to implement the kind of systems that are
mostly affected by XML, like content management and document
managament; well atleast I haven't come across one, and I can really
buy all of them.

Please help me understand this and hopefully I can pass on the
knowledge acquired among my friends.

Thank you.

Jay.