A matching algorithm for measuring the structural similarity between an XML document and a DTD and its applications

Abstract

In this paper we propose a matching algorithm for measuring the structural similarity between an XML document and a DTD. The matching algorithm, by comparing the document structure against the one the DTD requires, is able to identify commonalities and differences. Differences can be due to the presence of extra elements with respect to those the DTD requires and to the absence of required elements. The evaluation of commonalities and differences gives raise to a numerical rank of the structural similarity. Moreover, in the paper, some applications of the matching algorithm are discussed. Specifically, the matching algorithm is exploited for the classification of XML documents against a set of DTDs, the evolution of the DTD structure, the evaluation of structural queries, the selective dissemination of XML documents, and the protection of XML document contents.

A novel XML document structure comparison framework based-on sub-tree commonalities and label semantics

“… D-factor underlines the semantic influence of node depth on XML semantic similarity. It follows the intuition that information placed near the root node of an XML document is more important than information further down in the hierarchy [6,90]. Thus, node labels higher in the XML tree hierarchy should have a greater semantic influence than their lower counterparts.…”

“…In general, element/attribute values are disregarded when evaluating the structural properties of heterogeneous XML documents (originating from different data-sources and not conforming to the same grammar), so as to perform XML structural classification/clustering [16,31,55,58] or structural querying (i.e., querying the structure of documents, disregarding content [6,64]). Nonetheless, values are usually taken into account with methods dedicated to XML change management [13,14], data integration [29,40], and XML structure-and-content querying applications [66,67], where documents tend to have similar structures (probably conforming to the same grammar [36,83]).…”

“…Recent XML structure-based methods in [6,64] identify the need to support tag similarity (synonyms and stems) instead of tag syntactic equality while comparing XML documents. In [42], the authors introduce a structure and content based method for comparing XML documents having the same grammar (i.e., not heterogeneous), and consider semantic similarity evaluation between element/attribute values, using a variation of the edge-based methods.…”

Equivalence of XSD Constructs and Its Exploitation in Similarity Evaluation

“…In case of similarity of a document D and a schema S there are also two types of strategies -techniques which measure the number of elements which appear in D but not in S and vice versa (e.g. [1]) and techniques which measure the closest distance between D and "all" documents valid against S (e.g. [8]).…”

A Fast Algebraic Web Verification Service

“…Our embedding relation closely resembles the notion of simulation (for the formal definition, see [2]), which has been widely used in a number of works about querying, transformation, and verification of semistructured data (cf. [6,1,15,5] It is important to have an efficient implementation of homeomorphic embedding because it is used repeatedly during the verification process as described in the following.…”