Since the XML standard was introduced by the W3C in 1998, documents that have been written in XML have been gradually increasing. Accordingly, several systems have been developed in order to efficiently manage and retrieve massive XML documents.BitCube-a bitmap indexing system-is a representative system for this field of research. Based on the bitmap indexing technique, the path bitmap indexing system(LH06), which performs the clustering of similar paths, improved the problem that the existing BitCube system could not solve, namely, determining similar paths. The path bitmap indexing system has the advantage of a higher retrieval speed in not only exactly matched path searching but also similar path searching. However, the similarity calculation algorithm of this system has a few particular problems. Consequently, it sometimes cannot calculate the similarity even though some of two paths have extremely similar relationships; further, it results in an increment in the number of meaningless clusters. In this paper, we have proposed a novel method that calculates the similarity between the paths in order to solve these problems. The proposed system yields a stable result for clustering, and it obtains a high score in clustering precision during a performance evaluation against LH06.

Use of XML data has been increased with growth of Web 2.0 environment. XML is recognized its advantages by using based technology of RSS or ATOM for transferring information from blogs and news feed. Bitmap clustering is a method to keep index in main memory based on Relational DBMS, and which performed better than the other XML indexing methods during the evaluation. Existing method generates too many clusters, and it causes deterioration of result of searching quality. This paper proposes k-Bitmap clustering method that can generate user defined k clusters to solve above-mentioned problem. The proposed method also keeps additional inverted index for searching excluded terms from representative bits of k-Bitmap. We performed evaluation and the result shows that the users can control the number of clusters. Also our method has high recall value in single term search, and it guarantees the searching result includes all related documents for its query with keeping two indices.