On Efficient Matching of Streaming XML Documents and Queries

Abstract

Applications such as online shopping, e-commerce, and supply-chain management require the ability to manage large sets of specifications of products and/or services as well as of consumer requirements, and call for efficient matching of requirements to specifications.

Requirements are best viewed as “queries” and specifications as data, often represented in XML. We present a framework where requirements and specifications are both registered with and are maintained by a registry. On a periodical basis, the registry matches new incoming specifications, e.g., of products and services, against requirements, and notifies the owners of the requirements of matches found. This problem is dual to the conventional problem of database query processing in that the size of data (e.g., a document that is streaming by) is quite small compared to the number of registered queries (which can be very large). For performing matches efficiently, we propose the notion of a “requirements index”, a notion that is dual to a traditional index. We provide efficient matching algorithms that use the proposed indexes. Our prototype MatchMaker system implementation uses our requirements index-based matching algorithms as a core and provides timely notification service to registered users. We illustrate the effectiveness and scalability of the techniques developed with a detailed set of experiments.