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A coherent query language for XML

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Abstract

Text search engines are inadequate for indexing and searching XML documents because they ignore metadata and aggregation structure implicit in the XML documents. On the other hand, the query languages supported by specialized XML search engines are very complex. In this paper, we present a simple yet flexible query language, and develop its semantics to enable intuitively appealing extraction of relevant fragments of information while simultaneously falling back on retrieval through plain text search if necessary. Our approach combines and generalizes several available techniques to obtain precise and coherent results.

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Notes

  1. Note that extant search engines analyze only the content associated with the META-element, the TITLE-element, etc., and information implicit in the text fonts and anchor text (link analysis), for relevance ranking an HTML document (Brin and Page 1998).

  2. Our use of the terms “precise” and “precision” is meant to capture the aspect of “compactness” or “minimal size complete coverage” or “specificity”, and should not be confused with the standard IR term “precision” meaning a fraction of retrieved documents (or XML fragments) that are relevant to the searcher.

  3. Word adjacency information can be captured using phrases in the standard way, that is, delimited by double quotes. However, there is no explicit support for specifying proximity information or “window of separation” between two words, in the query language.

  4. In this paper, a subtree is always rooted at an element node. The root node associated with a subtree of a tree (resp. a subelement of an element) is a descendant of the root node associated with the tree (resp. element).

  5. From the perspective of specifying the query semantics, there is no harm in allowing internal links. These have been excluded here only because our implementation prematurely committed to tree structure, thereby requiring some duplication for testing with DAGs generated by IDREFs. An alternative implementation allowing multiple parents can enable querying of more general XML documents.

  6. Ironically, the declarative specification of the completeness criteria seems complex. However, its purpose, as illustrated through the example, is clear and its implementation, as discussed later, is clean.

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Acknowledgements

We thank the referees for their valuable feedback.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Metadata and Languages Laboratory Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Wright State University, Dayton, OH, 45435, USA

    Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan & Trivikram Immaneni

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  1. Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan
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  2. Trivikram Immaneni
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Correspondence to Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan.

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Thirunarayan, K., Immaneni, T. A coherent query language for XML. J Intell Inf Syst 32, 139–162 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10844-007-0051-2

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