Statement Notation for Managing Collections

[Tom Sugden]

Hi there,
I was wondering whether anyone knew of a proposal for an XML database
statement notation to support collection management. For example, a
statement notation to specify the following operations:
  o Create a new collection.
  o Delete an existing collection.
  o Add a new document to a collection.
  o Delete an existing document from a collection.
These don't seem to be facilitated by XPath or XUpdate (or XQuery) statements
in the same way that they are by SQL statements for relational databases.
I understand that these operations can be performed using methods
from the XML:DB Collection and CollectionManagerService APIs, but what I am
looking for is a Java-independent statement notation that could be 
expressed or
wrapped in XML.

Thanks,
Tom