It is known that text has not, in general, a regular structure. However, since its invention and despite the fact that it represents hierarchical structures, XML has gained a lot of popularity among humanities researchers: XML is easy to use and it comes with a handful of free processing tools. A variety of solutions were proposed to represent overlapping structures in XML. More or less easy to maintain from the point of view of data management, none of these solutions provides full support for two of the most demanded processing tasks: querying and presentation (XSL-like transformation).

We propose a processing framework for complex document-centric XML which generalizes the traditional way of XML data management to support overlapping markup processing. Our framework provides support for overlapping structures representation in XML, querying, authoring, and presentation of overlapping hierarchies.