XSD: A Hierarchical Access Method for Indexing XML Schemata

Abstract

Search operations and browsing facilities over an XML document database require special support at the physical level. Typical search operations involve path queries. This paper proposes a hierarchical access method to support such operations and to facilitate browsing. It advocates the idea of searching large XML collections by administering efficiently XML schemata. The proposed approach may be used for indexing XML documents according to their structural proximity. This is obtained by organizing the schemata of a large XML document collection in a hierarchical way by merging structurally close schemata. The proposed structure, which is called XML Schema Directory (XSD), is a balanced tree and it may serve two purposes: (1) to accelerate XML query processing and (2) to facilitate browsing.