BaseX was started by Christian Grün at the University of Knostanz in 2005 and was subsequently released using a BSD license in 2007. It is a simple, lightweight database that does not support a lot of features, but which could be just right for specific applications. Rather than using JSON like CouchDB and MongoDB, BaseX is designed to store document objects in XML. It supports standard XML tools like XPath and Xquery and also includes a lightweight GUI.