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Related Axis: The Extension to XPath Towards Effective XML Search

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Abstract

We investigate the limitations of existing XML search methods and propose a new semantics, related relationship, to effectively capture meaningful relationships of data elements from XML data in the absence of structural constraints. Then we make an extension to XPath by introducing a new axis, related axis, to specify the related relationship between query nodes so as to enhance the flexibility of XPath. We propose to reduce the cost of computing the related relationship by a new schema summary that summarizes the related relationship from the original schema without any loss. Based on this schema summary, we introduce two indices to improve the performance of query processing. Our algorithm shows that the evaluation of most queries can be equivalently transformed into just a few selection and value join operations, thus avoids the costly structural join operations. The experimental results show that our method is effective and efficient in terms of comparing the effectiveness of the related relationship with existing keyword search semantics and comparing the efficiency of our evaluation methods with existing query engines.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Information Science and Engineering, Yanshan University, Qinhuangdao, 066004, China

    Jun-Feng Zhou (Member, CCF)

  2. School of Information, Renmin University of China, Beijing, 100872, China

    Jun-Feng Zhou (Member, CCF) & Xiao-Feng Meng (Senior Member, CCF, Member, ACM, IEEE)

  3. School of Computing, National University of Singapore, 117417, Singapore, Singapore

    Tok Wang Ling ( Senior Member, ACM, IEEE) & Zhi-Feng Bao

Authors
  1. Jun-Feng Zhou
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  2. Tok Wang Ling
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  3. Zhi-Feng Bao
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  4. Xiao-Feng Meng
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Jun-Feng Zhou.

Additional information

This research was partially supported by the National Science and Technology Major Project of China under Grant No. 2010ZX01042-002-003, the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant Nos. 61073060, 61040023, 61070055, 91024032, the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities of China, and the Research Funds of Renmin University of China under Grant No. 10XNI018.

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Zhou, JF., Ling, T.W., Bao, ZF. et al. Related Axis: The Extension to XPath Towards Effective XML Search. J. Comput. Sci. Technol. 27, 195–212 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11390-012-1217-0

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11390-012-1217-0

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