Reformulating XPath queries and XSLT queries on XSLT views

Applications using XML for data representation very often use different XML formats and thus require the transformation of XML data. The common approach transforms entire XML documents from one format into another, e.g. by using an XSLT stylesheet. Different from this approach, we use an XSLT stylesheet in order to transform a given XPath query or a given XSLT query so that we retrieve and transform only that part of the XML document, which is sufficient to answer the given query. Among other things, our approach avoids problems of replication, saves processing time, and in distributed scenarios, transportation costs.