XPath 2.0 is the current version of the XPath language defined by the World Wide Web Consortium, W3C. It became a recommendation on 23 January 2007.
XPath is used primarily for selecting parts of an XML document. For this purpose the XML document is modelled as a tree of nodes. XPath allows nodes to be selected by means of a hierarchic navigation path through the document tree.
The language is significantly larger than its predecessor, XPath 1.0, and some of the basic concepts such as the data model and type system have changed. The two language versions are therefore described in separate articles.
XPath 2.0 is used as a sublanguage of XSLT 2.0, and it is also a subset of XQuery 1.0. All three languages share the same data model (the XDM), type system, and function library, and were developed together and published on the same day.
Read more about XPath 2.0: Data Model, Type System, Path Expressions, Other Operators, Function Library, Backwards Compatibility, Support