Data cubes for OLAP (Online Analytical Processing) often need to be constructed from data located in several distributed and autonomous information sources. Such a data integration process is challenging due to semantic, syntactic, and structural heterogeneity among the data. While XML (Extensible Markup Language) is the de facto standard for data exchange, the three types of heterogeneity remain. Moreover, popular path-oriented XML query languages, such as XQuery, require the user to know in much detail the structure of the documents to be processed and are, thus, effectively impractical in many real-world data integration tasks. Several Lowest Common Ancestor (LCA) -based XML query evaluation strategies have recently been introduced to provide a more structure-independent way to access XML