Querying XML Documents Made Easy: Nearest Concept Queries

Due to the ubiquity and popularity of XML, users often are in the following situation: they want to query XML documents which contain potentially interesting information but they are unaware of the mark-up structure that is used. For example, it is easy to guess the contents of an XML bibliography file whereas the mark-up depends on the methodological, cultural and personal background of the author(s). Nonetheless, it is this hierarchical structure that forms the basis of XML query languages. In this paper we exploit the tree structure of XML documents to equip users with a powerful tool, the meet operator, that lets them query databases with whose content they are familiar, but without requiring knowledge of tags and hierarchies. Our approach is based on computing the lowest common ancestor of nodes in the XML syntax tree: e.g., given two strings, we are looking for nodes whose offspring contains these two strings. The novelty of this approach is that the result type is unknown at qu...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2001
• Where: ICDE
• Authors: Albrecht Schmidt 0002, Martin L. Kersten, Menzo Windhouwer
• Keywords: Database, ICDE 2001, Lowest Common Ancestor, Query Formulation Time, XML Query Languages