As XML has developed over the past few years, its role has expanded beyond its original domain as a semantics-preserving markup language for online documents, and it is now also the de facto format for interchanging data between heterogeneous systems. Data sources export XML "views" over their data, and other systems can directly import or query these views. As a result, there has been great interest in languages and systems for expressing queries over XML data, whether the XML is stored in a repository or generated as a view over some other data storage format.

In this paper we investigate various aspects of representing multidimensional information in the frame of the WWW. Multidimensional XML (MXML) is an extension of XML suitable for representing data that assume different facets, having different value or different structure, under different contexts. In Multidimensional XML, elements and attributes may depend on a number of dimensions, that define worlds under which variants of those elements or attributes hold. Moreover, we propose an extension of DTD that takes dimensions into account and is suitable for describing the logical structure of MXML documents. We also present a graph data model for MXML, and show how MXML can be reduced to conventional XML for a given world.

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